# What I learned as a developer in 2022 - Dev Retro

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](https://nftque.netlify.app/) 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