Dev Retro 2022 - End Of Another Chapter Of Life
My 2022 journey as a developer.
Introduction
2021, one of the best years of my life just ended and I was all in for a brand new adventure. 2021 was more of a learning year, I learnt a lot of things including mobile development, web development and much more.
I've thought myself how to code all through self study. After a couple of udemy courses and a million different YouTube videos, I knew the very basics of full stack development and could actually do something myself.
The Beginning (January Month)
Starting out, January was actually a really special month for me. After winning a competition held by Sonny Sangha last Decemeber, I won one of the prizes and got in to his Zero To Full Stack Hero course for completely free. I was super excited about this one and also I wanted to join this course for a while, so I spend the full month going through different course lessons and coaching calls.
The Turning Point (February Month)
February was the most amazing month of year. I think I can even consider February as one turning point for my life. Hashnode started February with a bang. Hashnode was hosting a new hackathon partnering with Netlify. I couldn't be more excited, I saw the introduction post and thought to myself, I am going to build something and possibly win it as well.
I had just turned 15 last year and 2000$ was life changing money for me. So, that was how I built Wordable. I spent my entire month building, every night I did nothing else but coding. So after about 3 weeks I had completed the whole project. I wrote my first blog post and it was up. The article was even featured on Hashnode but inside my mind, I was always thinking if I will win or not.
The Big Win (March Month)
It was already March and I was busy refreshing the Hashnode townhall page like 100 times a day hoping that the winners would be announced at any time.
Well, that day finally came. On March 18th 2022 the results were up and I was a Winner. I seriously couldn't be more happier. That was one of the biggest wins and turning points in my life so far.
Also I built something for Hasura hackathon on March as well but I didn't have much hopes on it because I had exams that month and I had to do the project in a rush.
Another Turning Point ? (April Month)
This month was honestly a roller-coaster of events. Lot of amazing things happened this month. First of all I won the Hasura Hackathon. I couldn't believe my eyes, this was my second hackathon win in a row ! Meanwhile Astro announced their first ever hackathon which I was very excited about so I started building something. At the end of the month, I had built Astro Auth which was a complete auth solution for Astro.
At the end of the month, something interesting happened. Without me even knowing I had got in to freelancing.
The Other Big Win (May Month)
On May, I was continuing my freelance work participating some more hackathons and also I won the Astro Hackathon. This was another MASSIVE win for me.
Nothing really interesting happened in rest of the year, I participated to almost every Hashnode hackathon after that but I didn't unfortunately win any, but I kept doing more freelancing projects and I wrote some articles to Medusa.
What About 2023 ?
For me personally, I had an awesome 2022 and I am planning to keep that up in 2023 as well. Here are some of my plans for 2023.
Launch a brand new SaaS product.
Scale up my freelancing business through fiverr and other platforms.
Participate in Hackathons.
Write for more guest writing programs and write more articles in general.
Final Notes
Finally, I am thankful to everyone who supported me in any way and especially Hashnode since Hashnode is probably the reason I've came a long way this year.