So this year was filled with a lot of things. Things that I wished happened but didn't... and things that I didn't think would happen, but did. This year was full of uncertainties and possibilities, not gonna lie. I don't really have to explain it but I want to mention it at least... I really liked Look Back the movie (whose original story was written by Tatsuki Fujimoto) and so the title of this blog is Lookback. Hopefully, I am going to write these every time at the end of the year and this will be the first one in that series. I didn't watch much anime this year so that was also something that was new, but on the other hand I got into novels and audiobooks so I think that's pretty much fine.
And since this is about me being a weeb, here goes. I will split the year in 4 seasons like anime seasons.
Winter (Jan-Mar)
So this year started pretty well I guess. I mean to be honest I don't really remember much from January and February because I was just in a drought phase looking for ideas to build. I had this craving to ship good stuff this year and a bit of it was indeed fulfilled, but we have got a long road ahead.
I started maintaining certain logs in which I would keep my ideas and to my surprise, now I have more ideas to work on than ever before. Some of them are in the pipeline and some of them will get executed pretty soon.
This was also the period in which I started getting into writing. I opened my Substack... made blog pages on my website as well and such. Along with that, I released the first project of my year, Monochromate, which turned out to be the most used project thus far.
Spring (Apr-Jun)
The highlight of my spring season was that I was working on several GSoC organization repos. To be honest, I believe that I should have started earlier because it was just too late at that point and that was reflective as well when my GSoC proposal got rejected. Truth be told, I was disheartened by it a lot but again, when I look back, I didn't put much effort into it and of course there were many other deserving candidates for this thing. Learning my lesson this year, I could've started earlier but oh boy, I still haven't. Before I regret this yet another year, I will start making a list of organizations in which I have to contribute.
And then I got interested in CLI tools and that's how I somehow came up with the idea of Compadcn... made it under a week and even recorded a YT video for this thing and uploaded it... like it was a video with my full face and all. You can consider this my first video on YouTube because before this, the videos that were uploaded were just there because they had to be (like for hackathons and all). I didn't upload them because I wanted to, but that changed with Compadcn. Although it took a lot of retakes, in the end I felt good about it not gonna lie.
Although the launch of Compadcn itself didn't get much traction, it became a really useful tool to me and I still use it at times. Especially after all this AI slop and it trying to add some random shadcn/ui component that ain't even being used... Compadcn really makes it easy for me to remove unused components easily (smooth integration smooth).
Another thing that happened around this time was that I opened my BuyMeACoffee page and all, and due to Monochromate I made my first internet money. I can't even express in words or in any form of media how happy I was when I saw that email that Anna K. supported me with $5. I was really, really happy for this.
And then we wrapped up the Spring season by retiring my 13-year-old beast. It was time and this year I finally got a new laptop (Lenovo Ideapad Slim 3i for those interested). I am really grateful to the laptop that I had and I have really told this how much it means to me in my first blog, but the fact was also evident that it was getting slower and slower. But things changed around this time and I got a new laptop and it's really good so far. It does all of those tasks in seconds which took minutes on the previous one. Honestly speaking I was shocked when I saw that Next.js dev instance was reading in milliseconds not even seconds... something which took 13 seconds on the old one. I am really happy with my current purchase although I do feel that my mimetic desires are kicking in for a MacBook, but we will see how things go I guess, then only we will decide.
This was the first photo of my new laptop and last of photo of my old laptop TvT
Summer (Jul-Sep)
Really good things happened around this time. I was bored one day and wanted to just get some backlinks for my domain... I mean that was the initial thought... so I went to HackerNews and posted about Monochromate there. Now iirc this time Monochromate had around 200ish users (both Firefox and Chrome combined) and somehow that post blew up more than I ever anticipated. The post was #17 on HackerNews... it literally crossed 500 users in just one day and I also got a lot of traction on the GitHub repo. As we are speaking it's at 70+ stars and Monochromate in total has 1000+ users. It also made some people donate so I received like 2 more tips from people who were using it.
And around this time @nexxel approached me with the idea of his startup ie Mocha, an AI-native email client, and I was immediately onboard with the idea. It was a really nice experience working with him and also @suhassumukh and others on the team, but sadly it didn't last very long. After working on it for 1-1.5 months we decided to not go with the idea anymore.
Anyways since I got money from the donations and all I was really like... what can I buy... what can I buy with this? And that's how I stumbled upon physical books. I was reading books before as well (epubs on mobile) but the feel of physical books is just something different. Anyways I ordered my first book And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and it was a good read really. This thing got me into reading so much that I ordered a few more after this... I kind of got addicted to books rather than anime. Like if I were to say then 2020 was the year of anime to me... the year where I started watching anime and all, and in 2025 I can definitely name it the year of books/novels. I read so many different books. Although a lot of them are in progress, we are finishing them day by day.
Also forgot to mention before but yea I also like audiobooks. Like I tend to listen to them when I am going to sleep or something like that. My fav audiobook from this year was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari but after reading several reviews about it I also got to know that it oversimplifies things and all, but still I loved it and you can't change that about it.
Below is the photo of my current book collection although 3 are missing from this one and I can't click photo of them now because I am back at home so yea :>
Around September as well I became a speaker at an event where I had to take a workshop regarding Git/GitHub and make students understand what open source is and all. Not gonna lie this was one of the best things that happened to me this year. Before this I ain't saying I was so bad at public speaking that I shook my legs and all, but I was not good at it. This might also be a bit more of a thing when I add that it was just around 35ish students in front of whom I used to stutter at times. This changed with this event. I know I was not the best speaker at the start of the event but by the end of the event itself I knew how to address such a large crowd. That was an immense confidence booster for me... not even joking. And yea I am not like the best speaker out there and I still have a lot of flaws here and there, but I am good at it now. I think I am going to improve upon this in the very next year as well because it feels really good to speak your heart out in front of a big crowd.
Around this time as well I tested the second beta of my ticketing system (Stampede)... you can think of it as a Luma alternative but better I guess, and it's really good at where it is as of now. It is more of a side project that I only do around an event or something because that's where my target audience lies, but if you are interested in Stampede you can hit me up in DMs anytime, I am willing to share the details and all.
And that marks the end of the Summer season.
Fall (Oct-Dec)
First of all something that was really important for me... happened right at the beginning of this season ie Oct 1... it was my birthday (XD). I turned 20 this year shit man... officially my teenage years ended this year and I am entering my twenties with this one.
Anyways around this time I made my third launch of the year which was LeetJump. An extension that I made to solve a small problem that I faced in my lectures ie of opening LeetCode questions. I also made a video about this one and all. It kind of did exceptionally good on LinkedIn because that's where most DSA fellas exist but again, people viewing things doesn't equate to them using it so yea it's kind of stagnant. But it does solve what I wanted to solve and it does that beautifully and I am just happy about that much only.
December by far was the best month that I spent ngl, if you minus the fact that I had to give end sem exams in this. I received my first big money this month and with that I bought gifts for my family. I surprised them with the gifts when I came back to my hometown in the winter break and it made me really happy when I saw their reactions haha. They were not at all expecting that. Apart from that I also received some regular tips from BuyMeACoffee and all which just was the cherry on top. I haven't really bought anything for myself apart from chocolates and a new book (Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson, going to read that soon) so probably in the upcoming months I will figure out what do I have to do with this.
Apart from that, as if this was not enough, I launched for the fourth time. It was more of a "we" as BetterWrite was initally made by @ronitrajfr. To be honest I am still surprised and shocked. You give your weeks and months to something and even make videos for this thing and hope that this thing will get traction... and on the other hand you just sit and work on a project for 1-2 days at max and your project is simple as fuck. That shit gets all the traction that is needed. With BetterWrite we were #4 on Peerlist's weekly leaderboard and #7 on ProductHunt's daily leaderboard. We even got featured in their newsletter and as a matter of fact on both the platforms we crossed over 130+ upvotes without any fancy tutorials and much promotion.
And that marked all the major events of my December. And below is my sort of conclusion to all this.
Conclusion
This year was full of learnings. More importantly, it was a year in which I really came out of my shell not gonna lie. Lol at the start of the year I was not a photogenic person at all, like I didn't really like taking photos and all, but now I have an auto-updating album over my gallery which contains my photos only and it has like 500+ photos of mine so that's a record I guess. Like if I were to be real, previous year JEE preparation and shit really fucked me up in some ways. Got tired of a lot of things and such but this was the year in which things turned around. This year I realized how important curiosity is and how you just have to work and all and things will start falling into place after a while. This was the year when I realized more than ever that sometimes life takes you to the path that you least expected and gives you what you wanted in the most unexpected ways if you just work towards it.
Now you might say that what the fuck I am even blabbering about but ngl I have a strong reason for all this. Back in 2020 if my friends didn't want to play Among Us over VC in Discord I might've not joined Discord at all and cuz of that I might not have a lot of strong connections that I have over the online world and I might not be the person I currently am. Would that person be a better version of me? Who tf knows. We will never know it. This year was a really great one for me without a doubt and I can say yada yada like I hope the next one stays the same as well but that ain't true lol. Life is full of ups and downs and it's fine if downs come because then only it just makes it more enjoyable at the ups (bro am I a motivational speaker??).
As for next year, I have certain goals like launching more products and drawing more, because it was one of the things I did the least this year. Most importantly, I have to release my novel in some form or another. It's titled Fragmented Fork and it's set in a Solarpunk Dystopian world that deals with memory and the brain. If you find that interesting, you can very well hit me up in DMs and I will send you the draft chapters for beta reading I guess, so I can improve it.
Anyways that was lookback 2k25 see you next year. Wishing you a happy new year!!