This is probably the most remarkable New Year in my life. I am finally giving up 5 years of successful (personally) freelancing and consulting work and will be a full time employee of a company.
I am joining Times Internet group for a data driven journalism team they are setting up and Ritvvij thinks I can contribute a lot and I am excited about it as much as I can be given the circumstances. **turns and glares at 2020**
Some background
You see, I saw this TED talk of Sir Tim Berners Lee way back in 2010 and got excited about OpenStreetMap and have been making maps since then. If you follow me on Twitter, then you perhaps would agree that I have had some success with it.
During 2010 – 13, my dream job was to become a data visualisation developer for a newspaper. TED Talks on that subject were watched and rewatched so many times – I miss you Hans Rosling. Unfortunately I never actually become a data visualisation expert. It remained a hobby – notice the “Visualization” on the top menu.
… and now
I think what brought attention was me trying to make NER based data extraction a commercial tool. Ritvvij DMed me to provide feedback on it and a few weeks later DMed again to hire me for Times Internet.*
Suddenly, in the last week of the crappy year that 2020 has been, I found myself holding a role that I had dreamt of almost 10 years ago.
Tell me this is not a remarkable new year.
* Well, not exactly. I did go through a two day paid test where I did some work to prove that I am suitable and impressed at least one other person with my data visualisation attempts.
some thoughts
I am happy I get to build software for things that I do as a hobby and get paid for it. I think I can call myself lucky in that sense, even though I might have to find a new hobby, the old hobby becoming work and all.
I have spent hours agonising over the frameworks I am not confident about (hello Django, hey NodeJS), the new cool features I am missing out on (what version are you now on React? 16, 17, 99?), the amazing new paradigms that are opening up (nocode.tech), questioned the future as a Python developer and how what I know doesn’t fit into 100s of job descriptions that I skip across. It is remarkable that a job found me without asking any of that.
This is similar to the instance when 40 lines of JavaScript made it to The Next Web and Lifehacker .
This has brought in the realisation that, while I might not be a 10x engineer who can reverse a binary tree for breakfast, I certainly can create solutions that people find valuable / useful / interesting at some level.
And for that I am happy.
Happy New Year 2021 – Cheers to New Beginnings.
Arunmozhi 
Indeed an awesome achievement. Be super good at a bunch of skills, and opportunity will eventually find you – @naval, you are an example of it.
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