Get ready for an exhilarating and candid ride through my coding journey in the first half of 2023! 🚀🎢 It's been an exciting journey filled with hardware projects, writing competitions, and hackathons. But let's be real – mobile app development hasn't been my groove. Endless errors and frustrations have dampened the excitement.

But I'm not going to let that slow me down! Countless other code paths still need to be explored, and I'm committed to finding them. Join me as I explore the nuances of programming, create apps, and even complete my dream project. Grab your virtual popcorn because everything from monumental failures to minor triumphs will soon be revealed. Let's start this coding adventure together!

So, what did I do these 6 months?

Believe it or not, I went on a journey down memory lane, scouring my tweets, Google photos, and GitHub profile to unearth what I've actually been up to in the last 6 months. With high school now behind me for 2 months, you can imagine the immense pressure I've faced lately. Despite all the odds stacked against me, my progress outside of academics has been, well, a tad bit modest. But fear not, dear reader, for in the rest of this article, you won't be the only one getting to know about me. I'll be spilling the beans and reflecting on my hilarious and not-so-glamorous coding journey!

Next, Step by step, we'll traverse my eventful coding journey, starting from the early months of the year, as we dive into each task, accomplishment, and adventure! 🌟

Hardware project

This was my first hardware project. I participated in a science exhibition organized by my school. Technically it was in 2022 as it got finished in the last week of 2022. Alright, I am going to drop some memories below then I will explain more.

In our country, the election had concluded, but concerns about vote rigging persisted. Reports had surfaced of votes being cast on behalf of absent individuals, including those who had already passed away or lived abroad. This situation poses a significant challenge to the integrity of the electoral process. To address this issue, my friends and I devised a compelling idea for a hardware project that would ensure vote authenticity and read the fingerprint of the voters.

To summarize the project in short, we took a fingerprint scanner, wrote an Arduino program, and integrated it with other hardware components like LCD, buzzer, and LEDs. And we measured the authenticity of the votes. The experience was really interesting in itself. Interesting in the sense that it was my first time playing with Arduino and I got a lot of problems and the wires created a complete mess but at the same time, we were gathering the experiences and really enjoying the process leaving aside the thought that it was a competition.

Develevate platinum winner

You know I also love to write technical articles. Obviously, you are reading this article because I love to write, no? So, showwcase.com organized a blogging competition at the start of this year and I participated. If you want to take a look at my blogs, you can visit this link: https://show.aashish-panthi.com.np/shows.

But this was one of the good news that I received in the past 6 months. And the news was that I became the platinum winner of Dev Elevate by showwcase. Don't believe it? Here you go:

National hackathon

Alright, it was a hectic experience. So, to attend an offline Hackathon, my friends formed a team and named it Debugging army. It was our first Hackathon and we were excited about it. After all, we traveled around 500 kilometers to participate in that hackathon. Things weren't that smooth. I talked about my horrific experience in one of my previous articles also. I am going to link that, you can read it out.

This opportunity taught me many things about the competition, how to travel, and care for my health. This was the first time I traveled with my friends a very long distance and I stayed there for more than a week.

We actually visited a lot of beautiful places. I guess it is one of the most visited destinations by national and international tourists in my country. I really want to share my memories with you. So here it is:

Oh, haven't I talked about what we built? So I and my team choose the agriculture track there and made a mobile application and named it CattleCare. So here is its short description:

CattleCare is the all-in-one solution for managing your cattle. With features like insurance management, vaccination, milk production tracking, etc. Say goodbye to scattered records: hello CattleCare.

If you are curious to know about it more then we can get a lot more information here:

I am not faking it, you really get to know your strength, how collaborative you are with the team, and how good you are at task management. This event has changed some of my perceptions. This time I was really stuck for 4 hours during the 24-hour hackathon due to a silly bug that was just mysterious. The process of debugging can be both challenging and rewarding. While it requires dedication, hard work, and a lot of critical things, the happiness you get after solving the error is on the next level.

And one more thing I am going to share about the hackathon is the design of our application. This design was made by Saroj Regmi.

My team didn't win, the friends that were with us won the hackathon and became the national champions. Despite the odds, we managed to get some swags and stickers.

Desk setup

I am not joking before February 1, 2023, I had a very bad posture. I used to sit like a snake while coding. I found a perfect image of my posture before the desk setup.

Yes, I really had a bad posture and suffered from back pain. My back still hurts man😞. But with the end of January 2023, my bad posture also ended cause I got a new desk and chair for myself.

After bragging this much, how can I not share a picture? Before sharing it, I knew the setup is temporary and it was great having that setup for the next 4 months. So, I didn't go for super expensive, I just bought whatever was cheap.

Actually, it turns out, I didn't click many photos of the setup. So, this was one of the best photos I clicked, I know it's terrible😔.

Now I am back to my original position cause I left the city after finishing high school. And currently, I am in a city of opportunities.

Freelancing

Although I didn't get an expansive setup, still I spent some money. After the desk setup, I felt like I was being more productive. Right then, I also got an offer to work as a freelancer which I immediately accepted. I built some front-end components for him in React using Tailwind CSS. Though it wasn't my first freelancing project, I worked way more this time and earned a few dollars also.

Sorry, I can't drop any pictures about this.

Received swags

Your boy received swags from showwcase. As a platinum winner, I was supposed to receive a T-shirt, a cap, and a hoodie but I received only a T-shirt and a cap. It turns out they had problems shipping the hoodie but they are still working on it.

So, here is what I received :)

They hadn't only sent me these swags but they also sent me two showwcase stickers. So here was my laptop's lid after attaching the sticker.

Alright, I am not going to brag anymore about this.

Exams

I think I shouldn't be talking about exams but it followed me everywhere so I have to talk at least a paragraph about it. So, I had the final exams in May 2023. I had to prepare for my exam. After all, I had studied for 12 years straight for this event so you realize how much pressure I felt for this.

Yes, I couldn't learn new technologies or build projects due to exams. Technically, I had time to do all these because only in my mind I was preparing for the exams but the reality was that I was watching some youtube videos and Facebook videos all day long. But sometimes, I also studied and I have that footage.

Yes, I even recorded myself studying. Now think yourself how much I might have studied.

Club Assembly

How could I even forget about it? So, we had an ICT club in our school. I was serving as IT Head in that club. Basically, I was handling the website of the club and sometimes social media also. And under this immense pressure of the board exam, I even made a website for the club, then for the hackathon which was supposed to happen this June but got canceled.

For those who want to take a look at the club's website, it's here.

While returning from the national hackathon that I discussed earlier, we thought why not organize a similar hackathon in our school also? So, we started preparing for the hackathon. Some of us reached out to companies asking for sponsorships, some of us invited guests and judges, some started searching for the venue, some started to prepare the designs for the event and I started working on the website.

Back to back, a lot of things we did but our exams got in between and we had even collected more than 50% of the fund for the hackathon but we couldn't progress more because everyone had their own plans after the exams. So the program which was supposed to happen after the board exam got canceled. And I kindly put a canceled watermark on the website also. Here it is:

Oh, Grammarly just suggested that I spelled the cancelled word wrong.

Despite all odds, our first club assembly happened which was also our official end of tenure. And I received a certificate of appreciation signed by our president Sushil Bhattarai.

So, with this smile, I finished high school and tenure of the ICT Club of KMGSS.

Surakshya

The project on which I am currently working is called Surakshya. It is a React Native app that will provide safety resources for women in an accessible, simplified manner. You can know more about this project here.

I am working on mobile application development and again I am facing a lot of problems. I am getting errors time and again. And one of the things I hate about react native is debugging. In fact, I don't like mobile application development just because I can't right-click and inspect.

I am not working alone on this app. This is not a small application to build. It has a lot of parts that have to be combined together. In this Instagram post, you can get more information about the project and team members.

Overall, this application is totally a real-world application. It contains real data. It has real contacts and even helps women in need to contact organizations that are working for women's safety in Nepal. The application is in its final stage and will be available in the play store and app store soon.

And just now I learned to export designs like this🙃.

I learned a lot of new things in this application development process. And I am still learning new things every single day. I am working with map integration in this application and highlighting the regions and handling different events. Another very new thing that I am learning is app localization. We think language shouldn't be a barrier for anyone who wants to use this application. So, I am working on making this application available in different languages.

I am also learning to handle a large dataset. And how to render that immense amount of data on the screen with no lag at all. Also, this is the first time I am using Team, Azure, and other Microsoft developer tools.

Soon, I will be sharing the application.

Articles

I have already written 12 articles in the past 6 months. Some are tutorials, some are just reflections on the year 2022. I also took part in DevRetro this year where I received a special mention but no more than that.

You can visit https://blog.aashish-panthi.com.np/ to read my articles. I have discussed my problem and also shared how I overcome that and also shared some technical articles and experiences there.

GitHub Contribution

If you take a look at my previous year's contributions on GitHub and compare it with this year's then it's a lot less. I am going to drop two images here:

Contribution graph of 2022:

Contribution graph of 2023:

One of the reasons why I didn't write much code this year is due to my board exam. You can clearly see I didn't do many things in April and May caused my final exam ended on 19th May. And the source code of the mobile application Surakshya that I talked about is not stored in GitHub.

We are using Azure DevOps to store files. And sometimes the tree structure gets really complicated.

A short video

I also prepared a short introduction video for Incubate Nepal showing my passion for computer science. I made this video just a fortnight before my board examination.

Conclusion

I wish I had other things to talk about but these are all of the things that I did in the past 6 months. I have shared almost all the work I did and all of the achievements and learning I had in the first half of the year 2023.

I am also working on a new website at the moment. Truly, I got a chance to reflect on myself and realize what I did in almost 200 days. Looking at my schedule, I wonder how I could have even managed to do all these things but it turns out it was not that difficult at all.

Now, I don't have any exams and am free to do things so I am continuously learning new things. Currently, I am learning about the next js and I wish to learn typescript in the near future. I hope that the near future would in the next few months.

I still have a long list of to-dos and I will make sure I will check all of them out by the end of this year. I specifically didn't have new year's resolution but I had previously mentioned some technologies that I want to learn this year. And definitely, I will do that.

If you read my full article and liked it, we can connect on Linkedin and/or Twitter. Thank you for going through this long article about a boring guy.

Bye!👋