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A Technology Officer’s Look Back on 2017

by Prashish RajbhandariJanuary 3rd, 2018

Too Long; Didn't Read

It is 12:18 AM, and I am skimming through Bret Victor’s<a href="//vimeo.com/36579366" target="_blank"> Inventing on Principle talk</a> for the fourth time in two days. I’m kind of disappointed that I was 6 years & 653k views late. For my fourth time though, I have the transcript up on my other screen and New Year’s leftover wine on my side.

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It is 12:18 AM, and I am skimming through Bret Victor’s for the fourth time in two days. I’m kind of disappointed that I was 6 years & 653k views late. For my fourth time though, I have the transcript up on my other screen and New Year’s leftover wine on my side. New year’s eve was fantastic this year. I hosted a gathering in my new apartment & we had an absolute blast!

Moved to a new apartment in December.

Just Dance! The party reminded me of Cincinnati where I spent the weekend hanging out with friends and ended the year with a well-written resolution’s post. This time was different.

I deleted all my previous Medium articles.

2018 is going to be more of the same. (more later)

Iterate. Revamp.

“brainstorming”

This year, I met my parents after 1.5 years. Most importantly, I met my mom after being elected as the Managing Director of Nepal Telecom, the largest telecommunication service provider in Nepal.

Making us proud, everyday!

Clip turned 5. I joined the payment startup in 2014 as a summer intern in California. The company has grown to become a household name (“Clip”) in Mexico and has provided thousands of small businesses the power to sell more by accepting cards.

Today, we have grown from a dozen people to 200+ in Mexico, California & Utah. I can’t be more proud of the company’s achievement in the last couple of years.

Code for Nepal reached new heights in 2017. We launched two scholarship programs in Nepal, hosted the first-ever digital conference in Janakpur, raised funds for causes & created the first of many chapters, starting from San Francisco Bay Area.

We started writing memos .

I went head-first into really understanding cryptocurrencies, blockchain development in 2017.

I was invested in this space since 2015, but only this year, I switched my gear to immerse into the technology completely.

We worked on building a prototype (proof of concept) but had to pause the project due to technical limitations.

We went back to the drawing board to reassess our idea and vision. We have a lot to share on what comes next, stay tuned for 2018 (seriously, though!).

In the meantime, if you are interested in this ever-growing space,

I took Udacity’s Deep Learning course.

To sharpen our machine learning skills, we decided to work on some hobby projects. Unfortunately, we couldn’t finish them as we spent the entire year discussing, and not doing. We delved more into the problem statement and less into the implementation. It led us into a rabbit hole, and we couldn’t come out of it.

The projects that were interesting to us: predicting cryptocurrency prices, estimating vehicle travel time, recognizing doodle & storytelling and predicting the success of a government based on inflation. If you are interested to collaborate, This year, I also had the opportunity to organize the first-ever Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hackathon in SF Bay Area. Signing winning certificates was fun!

#GlobalAIHackathon in Pubnub, San Francisco. I challenged myself to be in control of my financials & investment. The goal was to understand the stock market & get higher returns than all index funds.

These were the kind of conversation we used to have on a daily basis. At the end of the year, I was able to get 3X the average gains. It was a fun experience to read earning reports & technical analysis. I’m going to keep on doing this.

I went a couple of months without eating meat. Ask anyone I know how much of a meat lover I was. If I’m proud of one thing this year, this is it, hands down!

The process wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be. I guess the stories where you suddenly wake up one day and are a changed person is real for a reason (hah!).

I haven’t completely switched green, but I have massively reduced my meat intake ). My goal in 2018 is to cut down dairy & eggs and exercise regularly. I leave you with my favorite reads this year and happy new year again!