Lost at Sea: Navigating the Storms and Sanctuaries of My 2024 Journey

This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.

Photo by Stockcake

Table of Contents

• Whoa
• Smooth sailing
  • Accomplishment #1: Becoming a writer for Pieces
  • Accomplishment #2: Participating in RSOD
• Sinking into a sea of confusion
• A Silver Lighting in Bleak Skies
• Shoutouts
• Footnotes

Whoa

If I were asked to use a metaphor to describe my tech journey in 2024, it would be like Odysseus sinking in the deep ocean due to exhaustion from constantly battling sea monsters. Now before I start rambling, join me in reminiscing about the wins, losses, and musings about 2025.

Smooth sailing

There were so many wins that I experienced in 2024, but I had to pick a few, it would be the following:

Accomplishment #1: Becoming a writer for Pieces

My colleague @sophyia messaged me on X(Twitter) saying that she read some of my articles on freeCodeCamp, mentioned @get_pieces¹, and thought I’d be a good fit for their content writing program. By working closely with the head of content, I gained deep knowledge about developing articles that are strategically optimized for search engines. Here are my favorite articles:

• How to Build in Public as a Tech Professional
• How to use Pieces to survive Hacktoberfest

Accomplishment #2: Participating in RSOD

Over the summer I participated in Rocky Summer of Docs(RSOD)². It’s where people win $200 for writing three-five tutorials for the GNOME Desktop section of the Rocky Linux’s documentation site. Here are few tutorials I have written:

• Valuta

• File Shredder

Through this experience, I not only learned the power of Linux but also how to work with a virtual machine, something that can greatly serve me in the future.At this point, things were sailing smoothly. Little did I know that a big storm was about to hit.

Sinking into a sea of confusion

It was July, and I was just finishing writing my weekly tweet buildspace’s nights and weekends challenge. Then out of nowhere, I started feeling very sleepy. Me being the fighter, I thought I just need a little break from blogging, open source, job searching, and tweeting to be my energetic self. Well that little break turned into a long vacation for the rest of 2024. During that rest, I found myself feeling unmotivated to post or do anything related to open source and blogging. I even came to the sad realization that my dream to being a full time technical writer is not possible for me at this moment. 😢

A Silver Lighting in Bleak Skies

Since having my sad realization, I’ve been doing some soul searching an idea came to my head. I remember a close relative suggesting to pursue a career in IT and brushing it off because I didn’t think it would help me with becoming a technical writer. I decided to give it another shot this time around. So after doing some research on IT HelpDesk position, I jumped for joy! 🥹 This role has the skills that I can transfer in a full time technical writing position. I know there will be more tough seas ahead in making this shift but with persistence and faith, I’m determined to continue sailing! ⛵️ 😊

Shoutouts

Topic Sentence: As I always like to say, “There’s no u in group”. Here are some people I would like to thank for their help:

• Thank you @elliezub for being a great colleague, fellow technical writer, and creating awesome work about Pieces
• Thank you @anmolbaranwal for inspiring to a bit more adventurous with my blogging! 😊
• Merci beaucoup @thomasbnt for being an awesome coding buddy! 😊

If you want to stay updated on my journey, follow me on Dev.to and check out my other social links below 👇:

🐦 Follow me on X(Twitter)

📝 Check out my other content on Hashnode

🫱🏾‍🫲🏻 Connect with me on Linkedin

Footnotes

---

1. Pieces is an awesome AI tool that improves your development workflow. It’s like having a coding AI best friend. 😊 If you want to learn more about it, check out my review ↩

2. Rocky Linux started this initiative after being inspired by Google Summer of Docs. Check out their websiteto learn more. ↩

Comments

[Thomas Bnt]

That a awesome year! Congrats!

[Christine Belzie]

Thanks @thomasbnt! 😊

[Anmol Baranwal]

Keep writing, Christine! 🎉 You can also find many community programs that hire good writers.

[Christine Belzie]

Thanks Anmol! :) I’ve applied to some but they don’t seem to provide documentation creation, which is what most technical writing job postings look for in candidates.

[Abigail Afi Gbadago]

Wishing you the best this year despite the storms at sea :)
Everything will work out for good.

[Christine Belzie]

Thanks Abigail! 😊 🫂

[Dumebi Okolo]

Keep writing, Christine. Really, I enjoy your articles.
I'm pursuing a career and a masters in IT as well! Fingers crossed for what the year has to offer.