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allejo

interstellar space pirate extraordinaire • https://allejo.io

2019 Year-in-Review

Dec 21, 2019

This year had a really rough start and had a bumpy ride everywhere in between due to personal problems. BUT! It’s okay, there’s a lot of other stuff that happened this year that made things interesting and enjoyable for me. Well, I’m sure a lot more stuff happened but these are the only things I remember or am willing to share.

Grad School?! Permalink to "Grad School?!" section

It’s no secret that I really despise the American education system and I was always disgruntled about being forced to attend college to get a degree simply to be taken seriously (i.e. getting a job with benefits). Knowing that, I shocked myself when I started thinking about going for a Master’s degree. As a campus employee, I am able to take classes and get a master’s degree at a heavily discounted rate. So the option was always available to me but I refused to pursue a master’s from the computer science department based on principal; their teaching ideals are heavily dated and obsolete, in my opinion. So I considered what other fields I could get a master's in and I started thinking about my minor during undergrad: GIS. Funny enough, as I was thinking about getting a master’s in GIS, I started consistently running into my one of my favorite professors on campus, Dr. Soheil Boroushaki. We grabbed lunch together and we discussed the GIS master’s program. After our lunch together, he had me sold on the program. But of course, I couldn’t tell him that immediately. I needed to pretend to think about it and I needed to figure out how to get my job to pay for my degree…

One of the things I hate the most is people complaining about a problem and doing nothing about it. Am I a hypocrite? I’ve been complaining about the education system for years and I have done nothing about it. Allow me to correct any misunderstandings. I am pursuing my master’s degree so that I may begin teaching at the college level and start doing my part, however small, in changing the education people receive. My current goal is to start teaching programming related GIS classes as soon as I get my degree.

The Rest Permalink to "The Rest" section

My high school has an event every year for its graduating seniors where alumni from the school will return for dinner and talk to seniors about their respective fields. Now, when I was a high school senior I was really interested in programming and signed up for the dinner with hopes of talking to a programmer. To my disappointment, I was paired up with an architect (I think) because there weren't any programmers available. Remember how I said I hated people who complain but don’t work towards change? Well this year, I reached out to my high school and told them that if they had any students interested in programming/technology, I’d be more than happy to come. Sure enough, they invited me to the dinner and I had a whopping two students interested! I was actually more surprised there were even two students who signed up with an interest in programming. I really hope I was able to give them some insight during our dinner. Also, I was one of the youngest alumni who was there. I was woefully under qualified to give them any life advice like the other alumni, but I at least knew my field! I hope to be able to continue being active in my high school's alumni community and participate in events like these in the future.

I’m a huge fan of Amanda Lee (aka AmaLee, aka Leeandlie) and her music and voice acting. I wasn’t able to find her original tweet but she mentioned a while back that someone was squatting on the domain she wanted: leeandlie.com; so she had to register leeandlieofficial.com. Well long story short, one day I was checking up on the domain out of boredom and found that it was able for me to acquire. And so I did. As soon as I had control of it, I redirected it to her (now) old domain and reached out to her to hand it over. Conclusion: she finally owns leeandlie.com.

I dragged my father to BABYMETAL’s first US arena show at The Forum and boy, was that an amazingly fun adventure; I’d definitely do it again and surprisingly enough, my dad would too.

I was invited to the GitHub Sponsors beta before it was released to the general public and I got my first two sponsors this year! I am really hoping that sponsoring open source developers becomes more common and that I may start working on projects that other individuals feel like sponsoring. Hint: I’ll gladly sell my soul for someone to sponsor me.

Software Accomplishments Permalink to "Software Accomplishments" section

What type of obsessive programmer would I be if I didn’t have a section dedicated to all my work in the open source community? Every year, there’s always something new and fun for me in the open source world and this year did not let me down. Here’s a summary of the most notable things that happened!

What's next? Permalink to "What's next?" section

As I've mentioned before, I don't believe in whole concept of "new year new me" or doing something new in the new year. I'm content with where I'm at and I will continue to move forward with the same projects I've been working on.

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