# Dev Retro 2022 - End Of Another Chapter Of Life

## 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](https://www.youtube.com/@SonnySangha) last Decemeber, I won one of the prizes and got in to his [Zero To Full Stack Hero](https://www.papareact.com/) 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](https://townhall.hashnode.com/netlify-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](https://blog.osadavidath.com/introducing-wordable-the-better-wordle). 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.

![Introducing Wordable - The Better Wordle 🟩🟨⬛](https://blog.osadavidath.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.hashnode.com%2Fres%2Fhashnode%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Fv1646940148356%2F8zgl6HZ5Z.png%3Fw%3D1600%26h%3D840%26fit%3Dcrop%26crop%3Dentropy%26auto%3Dcompress%2Cformat%26format%3Dwebp&w=3840&q=75 align="left")

## 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.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1671820081909/cWvahIrxp.png align="center")

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](https://astro.build/blog/astro-1-hackathon/) which I was very excited about so I started building something. At the end of the month, I had built [Astro Auth](https://github.com/astro-community/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.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1671913298648/MtoWlksKM.png align="center")

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](https://medusajs.hashnode.dev/advanced-ecommerce-analytics-with-medusa-and-matomo-analytics#comments-list).

## 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.