Becoming a Developer - Hashnode Dev Retro 2022

Hello there!

2022 is about to end, and I felt like making a blog post on what a wonderful year it has been, for me as a person and as a programmer. And the #DevRetro2022 campaign couldn't have possibly popped at a better time.

Many months ago, high school had just ended, and for the first time in the whole year, I had time on my hands. I first began by gaining a deeper understanding of Python. I had previously learnt Python, but there were a lot of holes in my learning, and I hadn't learnt many important topics like lambdas, decorators, classes and the like, so my first order of business was to relearn Python and learn all the new topics deeply.

Along the way, I discovered several tools and resources that I consider indispensable now. One of them is this website called roadmap which helped me refine my effort and make sure I was learning the right things. It was incredibly informative and helpful in letting me learn Python. It also offers roadmaps to careers, which I find really amazing.

After that was done, I decided I would go back to my roots and relearn C, my first ever, Turing-complete programming language that I learnt when I was 14. The syntax was a pain at first, but the more I got the hang of it, the more I realized how much control it offers over every aspect of my code. I realized that this language would be incredibly indispensable in my future, as my university major pertains towards lower level electronics and programming, and that demands granular control over every bit and byte. I then got the hang of the bleeding edge open source C compilers like Clang and GCC for the first time. It was refreshing to not use TurboC to code and execute C. Clang also has verbose compilation messages, which I found very helpful to find and fix bugs in my C code. I recommend starting out with Clang for beginner C programmers.

Then, I installed Linux for the first time on my pc. My first ever distro was good ol' Ubuntu, but as a beginner I decided not to complicate the process too much and begin my linux journey with a distro that doesn't require a lot of maintenance or scary shell scripting right out of the box. The installation process was fairly easy as compared to what I thought it would be, and voila! It installed seamlessly on my laptop. I experimented a lot with the distro, learnt about its inner workings, learnt how to use the terminal and use the distro for programming. I used several youtube tutorials and courses to use the linux terminal to its best.

During the time when I was learning and setting up my linux distro, most of the plugins, enhancements and packages were on github, and to clone them to the pc to build them, I had to use git. Since Github Desktop wasn't available for linux, I decided to learn git, and that was probably the best decision I have ever made. Git is an amazing tool that I cannot imagine living my life without. It is a very robust version control system and it is very handy at times when I want to revert changes to my code or to start over from a certain point. It is very brilliant when it comes to collaborating with teammates on big projects.

Then began college. It was really exciting to start this new chapter of my life. I am thankful to have met several brilliant people and to make them acquaintances. It was really awesome to see what my seniors had achieved and it instilled a lot of hope in me for the future.

Shortly after college began, I attended a few workshops and one memorable workshop was a data science + astronomy workshop conducted by my seniors on campus. It was possibly the most eye opening and enjoyable workshops I have ever attended. I had a brief idea of data science before, but this workshop truly opened up an alley to the world of data analysis, and a curiosity towards using data to understand the world (and beyond) was instilled in me.

And then came hacktoberfest. My git skills finally came to use when I had to work on several repositories on my local machine, commit and push changes to them. This event truly opened my eyes about the world of open source. I had previously thought of contributing to open source as something daunting and impossible for a newbie like me, but kind people on the internet pointed me in the right direction and guided me to making my first ever open source pull requests. Sadly however, I was not able to complete my goal of 4 pull requests thanks to a last minute PR rejection, but that didn't faze me one bit! I will be sure to rejoin hacktober next year and win for sure! I also became a maintainer for one of my old projects, and it was really interesting to see open source contributions from a different perspective. This endeavour taught me how to be a competent and open minded contributor to open source projects, the various lingo and practices that I must learn and master to become an open source contributor. It is amazing to see an entire community of like minded enthusiasts come together and create something valuable and memorable. To see a project grow better and better by the contributions of selfless people contributing for the sake of contribution alone, was simply something else.

A few weeks later, I saw the poster about the Decentralized Autonomous Organization of my campus recruiting for new members. It struck me as something really interesting, and signing up was one of the best things I did. I only had limited information about the world of blockchain, crypto and decentralized finance, but after becoming a proud member of the DAO, I entered a rabbit hole of learning about this new and superior technological frontier. With the help of my club, I was able to get an invite to the Hashed Emergent Web3 College Mixer event where I met a lot of knowledgable people and learnt a lot about the new web architecture. It was truly a relevation to me. This technology may not have the best use-cases at the moment, but an inherent need for decentralization exists in society, and I hope that someday this technology will mature enough to fill that void, efficiently and frictionlessly. Web3 is already making good strides and I hope there is a crypto renaissance.

There is a lot more that I did this year, but it gets pretty exhausting typing them all out so I plan to keep this short. I wrap this year up with 158 github contributions and 2 pull requests, which I hope will improve by a lot next year.

This year has been one of my most productive and most enjoyable years of my life. I was lucky to be able to discover a lot about myself and improve as a developer. I've learnt a lot of new things, I've met a lot of new people, and I hope next year is better, if not, just as fruitful as this year has been. So that's pretty much it, a recap of my year, and I hope your year has been just as enjoyable as mine was. Until next time!