Hola! 👋

Wait a sec.

We want to start this by apologizing for missing out on the last edition. We still feel awful about it and we promise you better. 🤞

And yeah, we are in 2021 — congrats on making it here, you are a fighter! We will definitely “miss” 2020. Happy New Year pal.

Warning! 🚧🚧🚧
Rambling ahead.
Skip, if you must.

When Abid and I planned on creating a newsletter - we never really thought much ahead. All we wanted to do was curate and send all the good the internet had to offer to a bunch of enthusiastic tech folks and share all the cool job opportunities that we came across collectively from our networks.

We were more than surprised at the love and appreciation that we got edition after edition and it truly kept us going. But we slowly realized, this required a lot of more planning and effort than we initially calculated to truly create value for our readers. We tried putting out an edition each month (P.S: Bi-weekly was the goal though).

So last month, we took time out to chart our goal for 2021 and decided to expand the team. So if you are interested in being part of this small but very ambitious set of folks - loves tech and has a flair for writing and curating- please feel free to reach out to @ekuttan or @kj.gopika in Discord. ☎️

So that’s that! Now to the good stuff.

Addressing the 🐘 in the room.

THE PANDEMIC affected us all. Schools and colleges were shut, almost an entire chunk of the workforce worldwide turned remote, livelihoods were affected and hundred thousands lost their job. Although things are slowly returning back to normal - with the Vaccine and all being rolled out in phases, it has truly changed our life, perspectives, and priorities. 🤷‍♀️

If there was one field that was fairly less affected, where hiring spiked and benefited with the whole world turning remote - it was Information Technology. Google Trends shows spikes in the searches to be a developer or a software engineer - ever since Covid started and unemployment started to grow.

It’s important more than ever now to prepare yourself, build your skills and develop that portfolio that you have been neglecting to put in Git or watch the tutorial that you had started in Udemy and forgot about it. DO IT NOW. 🤩

2020 for TinkerHub 🪜

Since the pandemic prevented meetups of any kind - TinkerHub moved online as well. It was an eventful year indeed starting with the Learn from Home series in March to the PyLad, the Instagram series, PyTorch, and design learning workshops. TinkerHub also partnered to conduct the FOSS United Hackathon, a Dialog Flow Workshop for Women in Tech, mentored contributions to Hacktoberfest and paved the way for many amazing folks to get a job via HireHack.

Most importantly, the Campus Clubs were flagged off and several amazing sessions of the TownHall 🏛 were conducting since November.

26000+. That’s how many students TinkerHub interacted with in 2020 across all the learning programs, Hackathons, Workshops, and Outreach projects - both offline and online. 🥳

TinkerHub has a whole lot of exciting activities and events planned for 2021. We are truly excited! We want to focus a lot more on FOSS & IndieProjects this year. What are you focusing on? 😇

To get the latest updates and news, get your Tinkerhub membership via join.tinkerhub.org.

What to Read 🔖

Are you familiar with Design Thinking? It’s okay if you aren’t yet. Here’s where you can read about it.

Design Thinking is going to be one of the most sought after skills because its application is wide-ranging and industry agnostic. The core concept is to solve a problem putting your customer at the core. Companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, etc have adopted this approach a long time back. Here’s an article from MIT which explains it.

Ever heard of tracking Pixels?

All those fancy suggestions that you get as ads as you visit website after website based on your browsing history has been facilitated because of this tiny snippet of code. The Digital Marketing industry relies heavily on this to make the most out of it to target & retarget users, get them to buy stuff, or basically get-you-to-do-what-they-want-you-to-do. Anyhow, here’s how it works.

An ML Opera - the what?

Here’s something fun that Google has been experimenting with under its Art and Culture efforts. Play around and create your jam 🎶

What to watch 🎥

Here’s a series of Ted Talks curated by Dribble for designers. We think everyone ought to watch it though. We recommend ‘Starting with Why’ - 10/10.
Sarah Drasner is an amazing developer we look up to. She’s the VP of Developer Experience at Netlify and a Vue Core Team Member. You can follow her on Twitter here. Here’s an upcoming talk with her on hiring and getting hired on Tech. We recommend blocking your calendar for this.
Ever took up a habit or made a resolution that ended up nowhere? Yeah well, you are not alone 🤫 . Here’s how you can change that though - IF you do things right. Here’s a condensed version from the best selling book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Let us know if following this worked out for you! See you after a month 🖖👋

On that note, why not start a #100da ysofcode. We’d say, any day is a good day to start coding. Pick up a skill or a language and consistently code for the next 100 days and see where that takes you. Always remember - Consistency trumps Quality for skill-building.

Here’s how Alvaro Montoro kept up with his 100 days of illustrations.

While we do not promote collecting namesake certifications, some of these are excellent courses to invest your time in to upskill yourself in 2021.

That’s all for now folks! Stay safe, spread love. (oh, what we are hearing right now 😎 )

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