I am an engineering leader, a chess enthusiast and an avid reader. I have moved as a software engineer inUSA from my home country Bangladesh at 2005 leaving many of my family members, relatives, friends and good memories. In this journal I want to capture how are my days going here in this migrated place with my wife, son and daughter.
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My Year In Review: 2020
Like many of you, I am looking forward to a better 2021. So happy new year! But I want to also acknowledge that 2020 brought some good things to me despite the Corona Pandemic across the world. While we are safe, many of our friends and relatives lost their near and dears during this pandemic. We are still in lockdown and counting days to get over this pandemic in the new year.
I, along with my wife, son and daughter came back from 3 weeks of Bangladesh trip in the first week of January 2020. I am glad we could go for the trip in as the Coronavirus pandemic and eventual lockdown started within a few weeks of our return from Bangladesh. It was so refreshing to see my parents, brothers and their families, and my in-laws along with my school/college/university/chess friends back home.
I successfully hosted an engineering meetup at Marqeta that many bay area engineers attended; it was a lively tech talk from Roko Ruze on Cockroach DB at our Oakland office.
Shusmita and I got our US citizenship in February. This enabled us eventually to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in November's US Presidential election.
Apart from the coronavirus for which year 2020 will ever be remembered in human history, the other bad thing that happened was George Floyd. I have been personally in pain for weeks, particularly as I have many good friends from Atlanta with whom I used to play chess when I first came to the USA, and many colleagues at our Oakland office - I could relate to their pain.
Professionally I made very good progress in my career growing a few engineers team into multiple teams. Marqeta raised further funding and became one of the most attractive pre-IPO companies to work for in the Bay Area. I saw my team expanding and several of the engineers and managers grow, some successful project completions that I was responsible for. I have been expanding my network as well via LinkedIn and a new AI-driven professional networking site LunchClub where I met some very interesting people across the globe.
I also attended a 6-week live program this summer on software startup formation with Shawn Kung, Venture Partner at AV8 Ventures, a VC firm based in Silicon Valley. He’s also an angel investor at Y Combinator Demo Day as well as a Stanford Lecturer. I partnered with 2 of the 45 participants and pitched the idea of Social Homes to the group.
I gave a talk on the role of issuer processors in the payments ecosystem at JUGBD Virtual Conference in June. It was nice to catch up with
My chess took a back seat this year as I focused more on reading and reviewing books. Despite that I drew with GM Enamul Hossain in Philadelphia Open, defeated WGM Carla Heredia in TNM, gave simultaneous chess in Marqeta Talent Show and thoroughly enjoyed Queens Gambit - both the Netflix series and the book.
But the best of this year for me was the fact that I finished at least a book every week (sometimes 2 or 3 books) all throughout the year. My Goodreads challenge for the year was to read 60 books, but I ended up finishing 70. My audible subscription helped me a lot as I find it faster to listen to audiobooks than reading the paper copy or kindle books. While I read various topics including philosophy, outer space, history, religion, biography, fiction, technology, science fiction - my major focus this was was leadership and management science. I not only read but researched the authors and wrote down the key takeaways from those books in www.dragon-bishop.com, my book review site. I have also been using podcasts, Udemy courses to learn on different topics. So I am very happy with my progress in gathering knowledge and sharing with my small networks many of these. I look forward to continuing this.
We moved to a new rental house near BART end of last month. We have stayed in LakeView Apartments for three and half years before moving here. I was too busy with my office works the last month and hence Shusmita did most of the packings. We got the new house key 1 week earlier than our move in date of first November. So we actually moved 24th October Saturday and took rest of the one week to slowly finish the moves. We rented DesiMovers who moved all out packed cartoon (30+) and many unpacked staffs. They disassembled the bed and assembled back again. Although a bit costly, they were quick and did a good job of transferring all the staffs and assembling those back again. All our friends in Fremont liked the house as we did. I wish I would not be a tenant but the owner of the house! However, buying house is very expensive in California and I can't simply afford it maintaining my current lifestyle, I let myself forget about it. Tuhin Bhai (Ripa's hubby) gave a surprise visit...
After a month of my Civic being completely destroyed in a car accident, I bought my new car yesterday. It's Honda Accord 2009 LX-P Maroon Color that I bought from Autowest Honda of Fremont . I have shopped around for car in Toyota and Honda. While Toyota Camry 2010 is also a very good car, somehow we ended up liking Accord. Whlile in Accord you feel the road and the power behind the car more, for Camry it's the smoothness of driving experience. Shusmita didn't want to even go for a test drive of Hyundai Sonata although that is also a comparable car at a cheaper price. I guess we are so used to our Honda Civic that only another Honda car would have been able to psychologically match our unknown requirements. I gave a four thousand dollars down payment and the rest my dealer financed me from American Honda Finance. While buying the car, I also bought the 6 years service, mechanical breakdown warranty, low jack safety and some service contracts. I came to know at that time t...
Just when I was thinking we (Bangladeshis) are moving forward with the newly elected Govt bringing hopes for a better democracy, I was shocked with this week's BDR Mutinee and massacre killings of Bangladesh Army's high officials in Pilkhana right in the enter of the capital city Dhaka. This is so sad that it can't be described in written words. We 6 families in Fremont were watching a movie Delhi 6 and at the end of the movie, Shahriar one of my friends told me that he just heard during the intermission of the movie that there is a mutinee happended in Dhaka little earlier against the Army officers. And it's widely suspected that DG of BDR Major General Shakil are of the many high officials who got killed as part of it. We rushed to home to call back to Bangladesh to make sure our family and relatives there are safe. Yes, by almighty, they were. But this is not the same case for many of the others. It's just hopelesss, sad, shocking and distrous in lack of words s...
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