2022 wrap-up: My Developer Journey

Hello readers,

I am Dharshan K, this blog is about my Journey as a Developer in 2022. The year was a rollercoaster as I learned a lot about Blockchains. That was also my final academic year too. I started this year with a positive approach by setting goals to become a full-stack Ethereum Developer.

The year 2022

Last year I determined to learn as much as I can. I started the year by applying for some Backend roles. My resume was eventually rejected by almost all the companies. I had built some good projects and also have solved enough DSA problems. That's the time I saw Patrick's Ethereum Course published in freecodecamp. It was a very new space and had a lot of potential in it. I loved the idea of a decentralized space which is highly secure and not controlled by any single entity.

Diving into Ethereum

I want to grasp, what is a blockchain first. I started going through the Ethereum whitepaper. At present, The crypto space is just filled with advice on crypto investment and NFT advertisements. The Ethereum whitepaper gave the perspective of Ethereum beyond cryptocurrency and NFTs. I started with some beginner videos and started Patrick collins's 32-hour-long Ethereum course. It was a challenge to even complete the entire course in a month. But great thanks to Patrick for this fantastic course which started from basic concepts and took to the advanced concepts and tools of Ethereum. It took me two months to complete the course. At the end of the second month, I was pretty much confident that I can start my career in the Blockchain space.

Learning starts

I learned solidity first, which is the programming language used in Ethereum. The language completely different syntax. The most important part of solidity is to make your smart contract gas optimized. Remix IDE was a beginner tool to test and deploy contracts. I learned about solidity and built some basic smart contracts like minting an ERC20 token, a decentralized to-do list app, etc. Then I learned about ethers js which is an important library to interact with the Ethereum network. At that time I know the basics of javascript. I took this as a chance to learn more about javascript too. Ethers js was fun as I have even started to contribute to the ethers js codebase which I will talk about it in the open source section. I was introduced to hardhat which is a framework for creating, testing and deploying smart contracts. I was amazed at how much had the blockchain space expanded. You can build most of the software you built in web2. Decentralized cloud storage platforms like Arweave, Filecoin and StorJ are the protocols that excite me a lot.

Starting open Source

Most Blockchain projects are open source. I saw many people on Twitter working on open-source web3 projects. Following Kunal Kushwaha's videos I started with open-source projects. It was more insightful, but on the other side, it is also very tough to contribute. These projects have a huge learning curve, where it may take a month to add a feature or solve the issues in the code. Going through open Source gave me enough confidence in Ethereum by seeing fellow developers who have decades of experience involved in it. My open-source journey will also go through 2023.

Grinding Leetcode

As the Blockchain was pretty new and growing, I don't want to be completely dependent on it. I also started practising Leetcode again. I started with pretty much a problem per day. I went through youtube videos of Kunal Kushwaha and Code basics for DSA. It was challenging at first because I missed solving leetcode problems for a week. But I make sure I revisit the problems regularly and practice them again.

Learning in Public

I was not very much into social media. But when I created my LinkedIn account, I got to know about the true potential of social media in your career. I got into Twitter where the tech community was more vibrant than any other social media app. Developers like Kunal and Eddie encouraged others to start learning in public. Post regular tweets on Twitter about what you are learning and write blogs on sites like hashnode, dev.to, medium, etc. I wrote my first blog and become more active on Twitter. I gained a lot of exposure by connecting with people.

Conclusion

In conclusion, 2022 was a rollercoaster with a lot of ups and downs. But what I gained was clarity in my career. I had a lot of feedback through self-introspection. I make sure that I don't repeat the mistakes. My goal for the first half of 2023 will be to get a job.

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