To start, I started making websites in mid-2019. So, I can say that I have started my journey nearly 3 years ago. But I am proudest of the year 2022 as I have done heck lots of things this year.
On this new year's eve, I want to reflect on what I have learned in 2022. And also what I have planned to learn in 2023 as a developer.
So, I am still in High School. It's a senior year, I am not that young 😅. And I have a pressure of an examination that I have to take while wrapping up High school. Therefore, the words you are going to be reading can be written by a frustrated high scholar.
Things I wanted to learn in 2022
I know many people have a new year's resolution. I am also planning to have one this year. But when starting out in 2022, I didn't have one so I struggle to find a path and learn the exact things I wanted to learn in 2022.
During and after COVID-19, there was a boom in blockchain and cryptocurrency. I was even curious to learn about it. I wanted to get my hands dirty with web3.
And that's all I had for a new year's resolution.
Things I learned in 2022
I didn't have anything on my bucket list but I think at the end of this year I have half filled my bucket with new technologies and languages. So, let's get to them one by one.
1. React
First and foremost, I can't forget about react. It's not like I didn't know anything about react in 2021. I have built some projects using it but they were simple. But by the start of 2022, I tried building some notorious things using this beast.
I have learned about Context API, UseEffect hooks, and other hooks. New ways of files and folder structuring. Serving the static, making a PWA with react, and also configuring the app before build to make sure it will work after build.
Still I struggle to reload the UI after some updation in page. Please help me through that.
2. Express
Ok, this is another beast on the backend side. I think I didn't have a complete idea about this one. I started out with this guy in 2022 and I am still going with this guy and don't have any plans to leave this guy in near future.
Express with Joi validation and mongoose makes a complete backed application in half time.
3. MongoDB
I love this database, I abandoned MySQL when I started out with this and now I am in a situation where if anyone asks me to do a project using MySQL, I will have to spend a whole day relearning its syntax of it.
Still, I have installed MongoDB on my machine but I am using MongoDB atlas which works fine on database requests but is a painful experience to browse collections through the dashboard.
4. Redis
I think I wouldn't have learned Redis. I had to learn it because I wanted to give a try to one of the hackathons organized by Redis and Dev.to on dev.to platform. I had to build something using Redis so I did build a project.
The project I built using Redis was a Search Engine. Yes, I also learned how the search engine works in 2022 and also build a search engine this year that give me a satisfactory result for my search query.
Eventually, I woke up one day to be a runner-up in the hackathon. So, it was worth it to learn Redis. Although, I didn't find the documentation I was searching for.
5. DNS mapping
I was curious to learn how the domain works. How do we hide our IP address with some random texts that we had to buy for an unreasonable about? And yes, I am talking about the domain names being extremely expensive.
I got a domain from namecheap and also from name.com and played with them a lot. And I used Cloudflare for DNS mapping. It was free, fast, secure, and easy to use. A thumbs up for cloudflare.com.
6. Linode
How can I forget about the linode. I have learned to map domains from linode server. I have learned to access the linode server from a remote place using SSH and a password. And felt the pain to install of the dependencies from scratch instead of going for popular alternatives like netlify.com or heroku.com that come feature packed with everything.
7. Sending emails
While learning to send emails through a web app, I got to learn about the mailing ports. I found out that 25 is the default mailing port and Linode by default blocks the mailing ports. I struggle to debug my application and after days of debugging, I finally found that solution. Or indeed a problem that was causing that problem.
8. Digital Ocean
Of course, the digital ocean provides credit to students but linode doesn't so I had to migrate to digital ocean after completing two months of free trial on linode.
And I got quite familiar with the digital ocean as it is similar to Linode. The only main difference is that digital is better in UI and documentation than Linode.
9. Web3
No, I am not so familiar with web3 but it is one of the things I touched on in 2022. I built a project using thirdweb.com.
I actually built an NFT marketplace called NFTque where you can mint, buy and sell your nfts.
10. Web Scraping
What is better than a puppeteer when web scraping? I used puppeteer to scrape data from websites in two of my projects and actually deployed them on digitalocean on a raw Linux server💪.
Conclusion
Well, there are many things I learned in 2022. But as a developer, I think these are the things I learned. But as a non-developer, I learned to write blogs and learned to edit some cool videos. That is how I crossed 1k subscribers in my channel this year.
I didn't have a clear plan about what I wanted to do this year. But I will surely write down what I want to achieve in 2023 in my note and follow that. Right now, here are my rough estimates:
I want to go for ML
I want to make an active open-source project with an active community
I will be taking my 1k subscriber channel to 50k
I will be learning python in 2023
I will be taking a gap