Greetings of the time, 

I’m writing my first newsletter as 2025 comes to a close. When I launched priyapahwa.com back in May, I didn’t quite know what I expected from this website at the moment, but I knew I needed this space for the long run to put my thoughts, my dev(/ops) dialogues (dev+logue; hence the name Priya's Devlogue 😅), community contributions, technical interests, progress, and whatnot. 

I still have a massive backlog of technical topics I wanted to write about in 2025 that I didn't get to, mostly because of that lingering fear of "would I get this right?" But looking back, I am really glad I atleast started. Here is a gist of a few logs I was able to share publicly:

Djangonaut Space: It has been one of my integral and beautiful parts of this year. Organizing these sessions taught me so much about building inclusive community spaces. I spent quite some time writing a couple of blog posts on the same, which can be found in the categories/djangonaut-space.

Conference Talks: I was able to share my thoughts on three different stages this year:

• [Django Day India Talk] Organizing Djangonaut Space: A Toolkit for Inclusive Events

• [Software Freedom Day Talk] The Open Source Community Invites YOU To Dare Greatly

• [PyCon Greece Talk] Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: Why Psychological Safety Matters in Open Source

"Ops-y" Things: When I did manage to beat the "imposter syndrome" to write technical know-how, I penned down some workarounds with CI/CD pipelines that I have been using on a routine basis:

• Deploying to Private AWS EC2 Without SSH or Bastion Hosts

• Accessing Private GitHub Repos in CircleCI

💚 DSF Board of Directors: I am incredibly grateful to serve on the 2026 Django Software Foundation Board. I’m stepping into it aware that there is a lot to learn and equally a lot to be accountable for. This post reflects on the process of being elected and the responsibility that comes with it.

Honestly, beyond the blogs and the commits, this year taught me that being persistent is half the battle. Whether it was stepping into a new role, a new technology, a new habit, or just hitting "publish" on a post I wasn't sure about, new learnings always happened along the way.

There’s a lot more I want to learn and try, and I’m looking forward to where that curiosity takes me next. Thanks for reading.

Wish you a very Happy New Year.

See you in 2026.

Warmly,

Priya