2020 In Review
We made it. Happy new year! 🥂
January, February, Quarantine, December.
The year started off just fine. Going to work during the day and then going to class at night. My social interaction levels were at an all time high. Then things started to turn for the worse. 2020 has been bad. Like, really bad. Let's take a look at some of the most notable things that happened.
- Kobe Bryant's death by helicopter crash
- Australian bush fires
- Murder of George Floyd
- Explosion in Beiruit
Oh and the Coronavirus. Can't forget that one.
When the first Covid-19 case was confirmed, it was 'work from home' and 'online classes' for me. I went to the office to take my assigned monitor so that I can set up my desk at home for 'work from home'. I cannot work on a single monitor. Picked it up and came back home all under an hour. And of course, started disinfecting everything.
I had stayed home during the whole lock down period. It quickly became very obvious that I was going to need faster internet when both my sister and I started working from home, and used YouTube more frequently than we ever had. We also had to start eating from home. We usually do not have lunch or breakfast at the house since we both go to work and don't come back home until late in the night. I had college from 6PM to 10PM on most days and my sister was generally really busy all the time. When quarantine started, it took us quite some time to even decide on what both of us can eat. Once we had figured that out, things were fine.
The whole 'work from home' thing was something that I've always wanted. But when it went into effect, I started to realize that it wasn't really that great. The work - life balance I used to have did not exist anymore, and the time I spent on doing work tasks was far greater than usual. I would wake up right before the afternoon, attend the daily meeting call and then start working. I would sit at the computer and work all day, wrapping up at around 12AM. Mostly because I had online classes as well.
Online classes were terrible. It was new to all the teachers, and they didn't know how to take classes effectively. All they would do is play through the slideshow, end the class and we'd get a tutorial that was due by the end of the week. It was their way of making sure that we had attendance. 1 hour worth of attendance when you are in the online class, and another hour when you submit the tutorial. Some teachers were completely unreasonable and made the due date of tutorials the next day. We had to submit on time. If you are even one second late, Moodle blocks the submission link.
Ramadan came around and my sleep schedule was ✨destroyed✨. I would be waking up barely in time for the afternoon meeting call, and would be up until 5AM and sleep after the early morning prayer call.
Work projects were kinda slow at the beginning, since I had only started working when everyone started working from home and I had come back from my holiday. I was assigned a few projects here and there, and then I was assigned a huge project, all to do by myself. LegalArchive. I had worked on the first phase of the project all throughout quarantine, and learned a lot of programming concepts along the way. The project had boosted my confidence in being able to handle large projects and broadened my understanding of the Laravel Framework and how it handles most of the processes. The administration panel is a work of art, while the public facing front end is not. I still suck at that.
I don't think I can talk about the project I am currently working on, but it is also a large project, and has a significant amount of business logic than any of the other projects I had worked on. Pretty charts as well. The project is in it's final stages, and will be launched this year.
Baivaru did a lot of stuff this year too, and I can't even name most of them. We did so many little things, but one of the things that I remember the most is the one that I worked on the most. Fully automating the movie/show request system. We made extra bots so that people can only request for things that are on IMDb. This allowed us to spend more time on finding the actual movies and  shows,  rather than going through the whole pending list and making sure everything is valid.
This introduced a new database table into our system, which allowed us to make an inline search system where people can search for all the media we have uploaded and get direct links to it. All without having to search for the file manually in the main channel, and without any social interaction in the request group.
Music request were 100% automated as well, and only required admin intervention only if processing was taking too long.
@phoenixatom and I also worked on a little joint project as well. Unique Dhivehi avatars for each name. You can read more about it in the dedicated blog post.
Athfan Khaleel
I'm planning to make it more like the Gravatar service. That way people can register their proper names into the system, and then any API calls will use the email address of the user, rather than their names. This way it can be more consistent across all applications that use the service.
I had also got into proper selfhosting of all the services I use on the daily. I finally formatted my Windows computer with Linux and my media server was a lot better. Windows kept hogging up all the RAM, and Linux only needs a few megabytes to run. This switch allowed me to have more resources to install more services. During this switch I had also learned more on application containerization and Docker. Shout-out to my friend that uses Arch Linux. You helped a lot with the installation and configuration.
One thing that kept me from loosing my mind this year was TikTok. With quarantine worldwide, the platform gained a ton of popularity and videos of people dancing to trends and even IRL ones kept me sane. My main takeaway from the whole app is mostly discovering new songs and artists. Tiagz is my new favorite artist to come out of this whole experience.
This new year is gonna be different for me. I'm gonna find the work - life separation again, and dedicate time to disconnect and play games or something. Haven't played games with the boys since quarantine and I feel like I have lost my touch. I also plan on building this blog from scratch, so that I have more control over the platform and add more features to it as I need. Phase one of that is already in the works, which is integrating a theme for the admin backend.
Here's to a new year. 🥂
