My name is Shikhar Sen, and I am a 27-year-old Software Engineer working in a product-based company. Throughout my life, I have always been passionate about coding, and over the years, I’ve grown both personally and professionally. As I reflect on 2024, I realize how transformative this year has been, full of challenges and significant milestones.
In 2024, I had many goals, and I always made sure to write them down in my diary along with their deadlines. I then worked towards achieving them in an organized manner. However, this year turned out to be quite challenging for me.
At the beginning of the year, I faced some significant family issues. In January 2024, my father suffered a heart attack, which was a major blow to our family. We had to undergo surgery, but thankfully, it was successful, and he is now recovering with some ongoing medication. Despite the financial strain of his surgery, I managed to pay off my home loan with my savings, which I consider a significant achievement for myself. This taught me an important lesson: while it's essential to focus on work, taking care of one's health should never be neglected. I make sure to exercise daily, which has helped me stay fit and healthy.
On the professional front, I am very happy with my job as a software engineer. I have been passionate about coding since school, even when most of my friends took tutoring classes. I never felt the need for formal lessons and instead taught myself using books, long before YouTube had as much learning content, and it wasn’t as popular as it is now for educational purposes. C++ was the first language I learned, and even today, I continue to practice competitive programming in it. However, at work, I focus on C# and .NET, which I find extremely interesting.
Throughout the year, I worked on some challenging projects. For instance, I successfully implemented caching in my project, which improved the response time, much to the satisfaction of our clients. Additionally, I worked on integrating IBM Orchestra with our project’s APIs and completed a Proof of Concept (POC) within a week. I also contributed to implementing Matomo Analytics into our project in just two weeks, even though I had to work on a different team’s project, which was based on ReactJS and NestJS. This was a very exciting opportunity, and I enjoyed working with new technologies. Currently, I am expanding my skills by learning AWS Cloud.
2024 was full of challenges, both personally and professionally. Yet, everything turned out well in the end. From all these experiences, I learned the importance of maintaining a positive mindset, no matter how difficult life gets. These challenges taught me resilience, and I will carry the lessons I’ve learned into the future.
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