Hello everyone!! 👨💻, Hope you are all doing great!
In this blog post, I will share my journey as a developer and a student in 2022. Thanks to "Dev Retro 2022" for this fantastic opportunity.
A little Introduction about me
My name is David, I'm a 13-year-old developer from Nigeria, I've been coding for the past 2-3 years, and have been absolutely in love with smacking my keyboard to create amazing things.
The Journey
2022 has been an excellent year for me both as a coder and as a person, In 2022, I've been able to pick up some amazing skills and interests in both of my worlds. At the beginning of the year, I was mostly focused on school, so I wasn't able to write codes as much as I would have loved to. When I did have time from my school I solved simple problems on Codewars, built really simple projects, and tried to find interesting stuff to do on Fiverr. So let's move ahead and start with the most important parts of my journey this year!
My full-stack development journey
Due to all my time and effort, I'm been able to call myself a full-stack web developer in 2022. I was able to learn more about CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, and Express.js and was also able to pack some new skills like React, NextJS, MongoDB, Typescript, and TailwindCSS in my bag. Currently, I have a few projects pushed to my GitHub which are mainly pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but I'm still working on some projects that I'd like to push sometime in the future.
My web3 development journey
Learning about web3 is one of the most amazing things I got to learn in 2022. Finding out about blockchain was pretty random for me, but in short, I was introduced to a blockchain developer who also lived in my state. Still, at that time I didn't know anything about blockchain but was interested in finding out more, so I started asking him about it while also doing a lot of research on google. While surfing on Youtube, I found a video that explained how blockchain works and a simple implementation in my language, JavaScript, so I built along and ended up with a pretty good understanding of blockchain technology. Here is the repository:
After my school exams in August, I got hooked entirely on smart contracts and started learning solidity, It took me about a month to understand solidity as I already had a good background in JavaScript. My main resources for learning were
And recently I got an early access NFT for Alchemy University and learning there has been awesome so far.
Although I had to resume school after a little while, I still stayed persistent in learning smart contracts and I even got to meet my mentor in person for the first time I learned a lot and got even more motivated to learn. In November I deployed my first Dapp(Decentralised Application). And here it is NFT minting site, building this project helped me understand more about minting NFTs, smart contracts, and Ethers.js. Currently, I have a lot of Ideas of things I can build on the decentralized web and have started building some such as my very own NFT project. I hope to deploy these projects soon and share them with everyone.
My experience in building with other programmers and interacting with the community
Another amazing thing I was able to do this year was being able to interact and build with other programmers! Since October I started staying active on Twitter and Discord, In this short amount of time, I was able to learn a lot about coding from the community and was exposed to amazing opportunities. On Discord, I was able to join a team of web/blockchain developers to build a project, working with these developers forced me to learn technologies such as NextJS, TypeScript, and Chakra UI for our project.
And on Twitter, I was able to engage with the community a lot and made many friends. From Twitter, I also found out about Google developer Groups and my friend made me attend an event.
This is a photo of me and other young tech enthusiasts at the event.
My mistakes
As I mentioned in the early parts of this post I was busy building little projects, going to school, and trying to find something to do on Fiverr. Looking back at my Fiverr profile and looking at my Gigs makes me realize I wasted time because I haven't made a single dime, I planned to create basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript websites and then use the money to buy myself a laptop, but I should have focused on building concrete skills with what I had, and then later focused on making money.
I also wish I started being dedicated to building projects sooner because the last few months of building my projects from scratch have got me a lot of experience with my tech stack and have also helped me to learn new technologies.
My plans for 2023
I'm inspirited that I got to learn a lot this year, and can't wait for 2023 to build amazing things, so I'm going to finish this post with some of my goals for 2023.
Create an NFT project
Create 2-3 open-source projects
Create a few side-projects
Start Technical writing
Learn Rust for Solana development
Reach 100k followers on Twitter 😄.
Contribute to a few huge projects on GitHub
Thanks for reading my Journey of 2022, also feel free to follow my journey for 2023 on Twitter, and comment on your journey in the comment section also