First Year in a Flash

Published: at 02:30 PM

First year of college was better than I expected it to be, I didn’t even realise how time went by that I’ll be a second year student in a month. To be honest I never really expected to end up in MACE, after 12th I dropped a year to prepare for engineering entrance examinations and I was really expecting an NIT and I really messed up the final exams, at first when I joined college I was a bit depressed, but everything changed after a few weeks, there was this orientation class taken by my senior Mathew Varghese and I realised that theres no point in just studying for the sake of exams I felt that I should get more into tech and experiment in all the fields, a few weeks later there was this IEDC meetup and I met a few of my seniors Feny, Ashwin and Shameel, and one day I saw Feny’s WhatsApp status on GDG DevFest and that’s when I came to know about the developer community in Kerala, since then I was eager to attend one

Hackathons

The first hackathon I attended was for our college techfest, I never knew what a hackathon was, Benil and Bonnie, my classmates, we teamed up and made a simple web app to get the weather data using openweathermap api

Debutsav Kochi

This was the turning point, the first developer conference I attended Sreeram Able and George accompanied me, Debutsav was organised by the Free Software Community of India and there were like these cool talks which I barely understood then, I wasn’t able to differentiate between Free Software and Open Source back then even though I’ve been using linux for the past 4 years, I met Subin, one of my good friends, he was a speaker, met a lot of cool developers and Varun( extra terrestrial being to be introduced later) says we met there, I still dont remember tho. apart from the technocal knowlege I got two t-shirts and some stickers.

so a lot of stuff happened after Debutsav, I’ll talk about the major ones

Remember that IEDC meeting that I wrote about (um.. two paragraphs above) I met up with Mathew Chettan the next day and he told me the idea of Macehub, a platform to document our college activities he even gave me a small part to work on it and that was the first project that I did we also won a hackathon for project Macehub the team included Mathew chettan, Shameel Ikka, Beena and Sithara all of them were my seniors

Somewhere by the end of december I attended and IEEE event SHE held at MEC, and that’s where I met Varun,he was a volunteer there, the best coder I’ve ever met the guy is awesome, he’s a first year like me and he’s on a whole other level, I also met Yadev who later introduced me to the Mozilla Community( that journey I’ll talk about in another blog post ), met Shahul Chettan who sparked my interest towards Internet Governance and later introduced me to the ISOC Trivandrum community

A few weeks later

Fast forward into few weeks I attended this great hackathon hosted by CUSAT, became good friend with my seniors Ashwin Joseph and Mathew Varghese, both of them constatly guiding me ever since again met up with Varun this time my team had Beena, Benil and Anas unfortunately we didnt win anything but the food was delicious and we got a few stickers

I think it was in January that Richard Stallman visited Kochi and me and Sreeram ( this guy has been with me since day one, rama if you’re reading this you rock!!), Subin went to meet him we attended his session, I ment Pranav, Athul, Joel, Devdutt these guys are soo cool to hang around with, we also gifted Stallman a keychain, and I got a lot of stickers from him

I also attened FYPM hosted by ICFOSS the theme was on industry 4.0 and as usuall me and Sreeram along with Ashwinraj, Subin, Mathew Chettan and Able attened it the fun thing was the train journey which none of us will never forget

Then FOSSMeet Happened

FOSSMeet changed the whole perspective I looked at life itself, I realised that you only grow when your community grows and it’s your duty to bring your community up, I met Amarjith Singh, the guy is a legend his talk was “Fossmeet:Past Present and Future” this truly inspired me, Varun Subin and Abhinav, Athul’s classmate and as usual Sreeram accompanied me I also met another Mozillian Karthickeyan he gave me advice on how to revamp and run the campus club( another story ). After FOSSMeet I felt I was a new person, until then I never really pressurised my classmates to come for events I was like, let them come if they are interested after that that whole attitude changed.

PS: Sreeram Deleted his Facebook and Instagram accounts ( May the FOSS be with you )

This was in February

By March we finished MaceHub, Sanskriti( College arts fest ) happened, Attended ISOC General Meeting, later in April attened Google IO extended along with my brother Melvin and Apzal, my classmate I met Kumaresan chettan a Mozillian, he’s a cool guy

By the end of April I realised that I was going into a burn out and I decided to take some time off ( plus excessive motivation from Varun to help me get out)

On the professional and developer side

That was First Year in a Flash