2018 - Year In Review

#yearinreview #webdev #career

2018 has been an amazing year for me. I learnt new things, built a few things, wrote a handful of blog posts and met some amazing devs in the community. But above all, I became a better dev by learning and reflecting on my mistakes throughout. Here's a quick list down of how 2018 turned out to be an amazing year for me.

Things I built in 2018

Browser or Node - January
Typy - February
Dev Landing Page - March
Axios Retry Interceptor - March
React-Redux Boilerplate - March
React Render-In-Browser - May
React Socks - November
Typy v3 - December
React Socks Stable - December

Things I wrote in 2018

How I got started with Open-Source - February
Accessing Nested Objects in JavaScript - February
Short Circuit Assignment in JavaScript - February
Publish your own NPM package - March
Create your developer landing page with GitHub Pages - March
React-Redux Boilerplate with Best Practices - March
Upgrade to Webpack 4 - March
I Created My Portfolio with React and Some Magic - April
Render Browser Specific Content with React - May
Introducing Responsive React Components - November

Goal Stats

✅ Start with OSS (have over 10 actively maintained projects now)
✅ Become an active contributor to a repo that’s not mine (became one of the top contributors)
✅ Create and publish a library that others find helpful (have 7 libs now with 130k+ downloads)
✅ Build a portfolio
✅ Hit 1k reps in Stack Overflow (2.4k currently)
✅ Hit 1k followers in dev.to (2.2k currently)
✅ Learn Docker, ELK stack, reverse proxy
⚠️ Hit 700 followers in twitter (695 now)
❌ Build a website that others find helpful
❌ Learn GraphQL, serverless, web components

Summary

Started with OSS
Quit my awesome job to take on a challenging role
Moved to new country
Started contributing more in Stack Overflow
Started building and publishing libraries
Started writing about the things I learn and the things I build
Became a publisher in Hackernoon and Codeburst
All my write ups together have been viewed over 250k times (100k+ DEV and 150k+ Medium)
A few blog posts that I wrote got featured in other platforms and curations
Found awesome people in the community (twitter and dev.to) and drew inspiration from them

Dev principles I picked up in 2018

I want to wrap up this post by highlighting a few dev principles I learnt and strictly adopted in my workflow in 2018.

Code without tests is as good as no code at all
No Abstraction > Wrong Abstraction
Most optimization strategies you come up with will either result in premature-optimization or over-optimization. Optimize only when absolutely necessary.
Have a broader vision of the problem/solution but break it down and build in small portions incrementally
If you add a todo to improve later, you’ll never get back to it. So, do it now.