My 2022 Year in Review - Dev Retro 2022

My 2022 Year in Review

I never imagined that I would spend the entirety of 2022 at home. Why?

Because this year was supposed to be my second year at the university where I am studying Automotive Engineering, my study was cut short when the universities commission had a fallout with the Nigerian Federal Government and declared a strike action.

A fallout that had been brewing for years. We all knew it was a matter of time before the Universities would say enough is enough. What we did not anticipate was that the strike would last for a whole year. For me, however, this disappointment would turn into a blessing.

The 10 months that would follow from the commencement of the strike turned out to be the most productive of my life (literally). I learned in a year what would have taken me years to learn if school was in session. Just for a quick reference, here's a timeline of my 2022:

January 1st to February 14

• School Resumes
• Strike action was declared on February 14th (the perfect val for students who were in love).

February 14 to March 21st

• I was between having the hopes of school resuming and thinking about what to do with my life while I sat at home all day doing nothing.
• Purchased Colt Steele's Web Dev course on Udemy for $8 (discount), but I was only able to cover 20% of the course. I hope to complete it one day.
• When I started, I had this false belief that I'd get a job in 6 months.
• I joined ABU's GDSC Chapter on March 5th.
• I went through the basics of CSS and Javascript on w3schools.com.
• Transitioned to javascript.info (this is my main resource for learning javascript now).
• Came back to Twitter after it was unbanned by the FG. (It was unbanned in my country in January 2022).
• Discovered Codewars through a Twitter post (Doing a few DSAs helped me appreciate some concepts like array methods).
• Somedays, I didn't have the motivation to keep going, so I'd stop coding for a day or two, sometimes a week.
• Started learning Spanish on Duolingo (Hola amigos!).

April to May

• April-May were among the most productive months for me because. It was as if I started getting a high from coding. Every morning I woke, I would think of the last concept I learned the night before and pick up from there.

I developed a structured timeline for learning which I still follow sometimes, although not as religiously as I did before.

• The timetable was like this: I would alternate my weekdays between learning CSS and JavaScript e.g (Mon - CSS, Tues - JS ...)

• Then weekends were strictly for going through the Google Technical Writing course, watching movies, and chilling. I made sure that my weekends were totally off-limits. I used my weekends to relax and recharge

June

• I discovered a free online software engineering boot camp (ALX Africa). The boot camp was for a year, and I was sure that school would resume before the year's end, but I still registered, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
• Joined the June cohort and learned Git and Github in 2 weeks.
• Spent the remaining two weeks learning Shell scripting. (This was the most interesting part of the course for me).
• It was becoming obvious that there were no plans to call off the strike.

July - August

• I installed a Linux distro (Zorin OS) alongside my Windows. My productivity increased soon after, and I use it all the time, except when I want to watch movies or play games then I switch to Windows.
• This is when I started contemplating whether I should continue the ALX course.
• We were introduced to C programming language. Luckily for me, I knew a little bit of JavaScript. Therefore, the basics were quite simple for me until two weeks later.
• I started submitting assignments late, and sometimes I would shamelessly clone solutions of past students from GitHub and submit them just to pass.
• I kept struggling like this until August 26, when I finally quit.
• Learning C, however, was an eye-opening experience as I got to understand some computer science concepts like stacks, pointers, compilers, references, and heaps, on a deeper level.
• We even did a little bit of Python before I quit.

September

• Midway through August, I started learning Angular through MDN (Mozilla). I contributed to the MDN repo on GitHub by correcting some mistakes in the documentation for the Angular tutorial. At the time, I didn't even know what Open Source was. It was just a word I heard occasionally.
• While I was still learning Angular, I discovered a beginner-friendly Open Source project on GitHub. I forked it and implemented a feature.
• It took me a month to implement this feature because the project was based on TypeScript, and I was new to TypeScript at the time.
• I joined a three months UI/UX design boot camp (I quit after a month). I learned how to use Figma though, and I still use it occasionally.

October

• In the weeks leading to October, there was a lot of hype about Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of Open Source, and it is organized yearly by Digital Ocean in October of every year.
• I took part in Hacktoberfest for the first time. I made lots of valuable contributions to Open Source projects. Projects I contributed to include Node.js, Shastra OS, Percona, and Novu.
• I dedicated the whole month to contributing to Open Source only. Nothing else I joined hacksquad.dev and led my team (Dream Team) to 6th position out of 765 teams, and we were awarded swag for being among the top 50 teams. It was a rollercoaster experience because we started from the bottom and made it all the way up after much hard-work.
• In the end, all the hard work eventually paid off. Percona, Novu(Hacksquad), Shastra, and Hacktoberfest sent me emails congratulating me on winning swag ( 4 T-shirts, Stickers, and a mug).
• I published my first blog post on Open Source on Dev

November

• Started suffering from a burn-out for almost 2 weeks immediately after October ended due to over-exhaustion during Hacktoberfest.
• I began a new Angular project while refactoring the first one I built in September (a todo app)
• I volunteered to join the tech/ career talks group of Mediahooch - A tech hub in my local community. I saw this as an opportunity to improve my public speaking skills.

December

• Argentina wins the World Cup. What a way to end 2022.

• My December started off quite well. I was simultaneously learning CSS ( still battling with this one) and Angular by building projects.

• I became more productive by taking breaks and sleeping well.

• In December, I realized that I had been coding for a month and two weeks straight without suffering from a burn-out. How did I do it? I prioritized my mental health.

• Finally watched Hunter x Hunter
• I started preparing for school in the last weeks of December. School resumes on January 3rd, 2023. Finally, after a year at home ( a very productive one for me).
• Currently building a card matching game with Angular (It's almost finished).
• Strictly speaking, it has only been 9 months (April - till date) since I started this journey, and my progress is astonishing (to me at least), and I couldn't be more proud of myself.

Throughout 2022, I learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and I'm still developing myself.

Some of the mistakes I made and would like to improve on in 2023 are:

• Not resting and sleeping well (These were the sources of my breakdowns).
• Taking on too many things at a time and jumping on new things when I am not done with the ones at hand.
• Public Speaking (I spoke on a few Twitter spaces in 2022), but I plan to attend physical meetups and connect with developers in my local community.
• Prioritize your mental health and well-being (I learned this the hard way).
• Videos and Online boot camps don't work well for me. I prefer learning with written materials and at my own pace.
• I learned things that I was not using or was not going to use. I later realized that it's way easier and better to learn something that you will use in the long run.
• I occasionally suffered from impostor syndrome. In fact, I had to leave Twitter for a while until I became more confident in my abilities.
• I eventually came to terms with the fact that it takes much more than 6 months to master web development.
• Right now, I'm focused on building projects that I am passionate about and improving my skills for as long as it takes.

There was a time when I used to be afraid of the arrow function syntax, Promises, reduce method, classes, OOP, TypeScript, Nodejs, CSS (still struggling with), and so much more. Who would have thought that I would be using these concepts almost daily 9 months later? Mind you, I started this journey in 2022. I am proud of the progress I have made so far, even though I have not built any major project yet. That's one of my main goals for 2023. To build as many projects as possible.

In between these months, there were times I fell ill, had power outages for days, suffered from burn-outs, attended weddings and did so much more. Nobody's journey is perfect, even though that's what social media tells you about people. We are all human, and things happen. I mentioned these things to encourage anyone who's reading that the road is always difficult, but in the end, the reward is worth the effort.

Today, I can proudly call myself a Front end developer, Technical Writer and a deep admirer of Open Source. The goal of this article was to share my tech journey in 2022 with you. 2022 has been an enlightening year for me. I learned and unlearned a lot. Thanks for reading till the end, and I hope to see you next year.

Adios Amigos!!!