My year in Review!

Working on Frontend Skills 💻

At the start of 2021, I was working on my Frontend Skills while working full time. Having read HTML and CSS and JavaScript and jQuery from John Ducket in late 2020, I was working to Advance my modern CSS skills from a course of Jonas Schmedtmann .

Later in the year I started reading Eloquent JavaScript and was starting to look for some practice projects to work on.

Taking a step ahead with Frontend Mentor 🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️🚶🏻‍♂️🚶🏻‍♂️

After a little research and trying stuff out, I went ahead with Frontend Mentor Free challenges.

Because I was interested in UI/UX design, I was learning how to use Figma/Adobe XD. The Frontend Mentor challenges provided me with a good exercise of recreating designs from the images they provided.

Frontend Mentor : Gateway to join Twitter 🚪🚪

Working on Frontend Mentor was a great way for me to learn. Also started to actively participate in giving suggestions to solutions shared by community members.

After completing a challenge, Frontend Mentor would prompt members to share it on Twitter and other social media. I did post it on Twitter but I wasn't very active there.

Finding my Identity "aUnicornDev" 🦄🦄

For the past few months, I was trying to figure out in what way I could stand out. I was learning how to Design and Develop and wanted to put that in words .

One day, I stumbled upon an article "Life of a Unicorn Developer"

"This is IT. Defines me perfectly."

I was also actively scrolling through Twitter in these days, found this tweet from Florin Pop

After this tweet, I created new socials for my side work. Gmail, Twitter, GitHub, Frontend Mentor, Figma ... Basically everything I had up to that point.

Observing and Starting with 100DaysOfCode 🔍🔍

I was very active on Frontend Mentor community for a month and wanted to do more than that.

Even after being on twitter for about a month, I did not start to post randomly. I observed what everyone else was doing , followed a few people and chose to go with #100DaysOfCode challenge.

The #100DaysOfCode was a good path for me to start because I had been planning to learn Vue from some time and it felt like the right thing to do, given the limited amount of time I have after my 9-5.

The challenge I started in August was going pretty good but I was kind of juggling between learning Vue and a side project that had just come up.

Getting to know Tech. Writing through Hashnode ✏✏

During September, I joined a the Technical Writing BootCamp from Hashnode. This was a very busy period for me and I attended the workshop.. but was not able to finish any of the writing prompts.

Got to know a bunch of very amazing people in the community Chris Bongers, Sam Sycamore, Tapas Adhikary ,Avneesh Agarwal.

Introduction to Open Source 👾👾

Mid September there was this whole Hacktober Fest train going around and I jumped on that too.

Wrote my first article for Maintaining an Open Source Project.

Made the tabsMonster project Open Source, received a ton of contribution, merged PR's , wrote an article about the project.

Even received some good feedback from Eddie Jaoude on the repository.

At the end of October, I went on a vacation and did not continue anything I was doing after my vacation ended.

What went wrong at the end? 🤯🤯🤯🤯

I was running into the Red

I noticed this pattern while being in that situation , but now when I'm writing it down, it seems much more evident. I was jumping from one thing to another, trying to hold more than I could.

Trying out things was great, but I was feeling I was not productive enough which is wrong given that I was just starting out with so many new things.

I was not giving myself room to make mistakes and it felt like a task rather than fun.

I WAS BURNED OUT

This was the first long break I had in months from my side projects.

After taking a step back I realized that at this point, I was not learning Vue, the #100DaysOfCode challenge was long lost.

I felt so light when I was away from everything that it felt like a burden to join back in.

So I completely abandoned everything in November.

But what NOW?

I utilized my December planning for what what I'm going to post on Hashnode and Twitter, will mostly stay away from work on weekends, and will try to stick what was planned.

Web3 is the hottest thing right now, and I plan not to deviate myself from what I've decided.

This year had been a rollercoaster ride. It was fun and exhausting to do what I did. Planning on removing the exhaustion from it.

🎊🎊 Happy New Year 🎊🎊