2023: A Fresh Start - Reflecting on the First Two Weeks of the New Year

2023 has just begun, and there are a lot of things happening around, especially in tech. As a developer, it's important to stay on top of these changes and continuously improve. That's why I have decided to take a step back and reflect on my progress and growth during this period.

Answering a few questions you might have before we start.

What am I going to write in this blog post?

I am planning to start writing my weekly progress and actions I have taken to achieve my goal. It will be similar to a personal journal, and I will write what I have learned and accomplished this week and my goals for next week. I am still not sure about the outline so I will keep experimenting with different formats and see what works for me.

Why am I starting this now?

I wanted to participate in DevRetro 2022, as I began to write the outline for the blog I noticed that there weren't many things that I was able to jot down for the first six months of 2022, whereas I have learned new things, made side projects, worked at a startup, participated in hackathons and enjoyed last six months of my college with my friends during that time. So I decided to write a reflection on things I did to achieve my goals and improve my career every one or two weeks based on how the week goes.

Why am I writing this as a blog post?

You might think that reflecting on my progress and writing a personal retrospective should be done in a personal journal, so why am I writing it as a blog post?

I want to make journaling a regular habit. The most effective way to keep me accountable is to write it as a blog and share it with the public instead of writing it in my diary or notion. Also, this would be a good opportunity for me to make new friends and get feedback and advice from others.

Note: Since this is a public post I won't include each and every detail.

Building a better me: My learnings in the first two weeks of 2023.

I started two react side projects one of which was for a Hackathon. Also, I got to know about a technical platform where we can solve quests to learn about issues we might face in production and also solve bugs in the existing codebase. So I solved 4 quests from that platform. I also used GPT3 API to create an AI writer with GPT3 as a part of the build. Apart from these things I also solve few DSA questions on leetcode, but I am not going to write about them here :-)

Creating a table from scratch in React

I created a basic React project which will fetch data from an API and render it in the table, It will also have a feature to edit and delete rows in place and also search to filter the data. It also has a pagination feature to show only 10 items per row.

I have completed the edit, delete and pagination features, this week I will work on the search feature and also write a blog on this mini project.

Brainstorming on ideas for HackNITR 4.0

I participated in HackNITR hackathon, I worked on ProgressPaver, A goal tracking app to Achieve your goals, one step at a time. I worked only on the weekend for this project and I am planning to continue this project next month as I am currently part of Nights and weekends so I am focusing on that product this month.

Nights and Weekends: S2

Nights and Weekends is a 6-week program to help builders and hackers gtfo localhost and grow their products. In the last two weeks, we had a call with Ryan hoover from product hunt where he shared his experience and also gave us a few pieces of advice to grow our product. We also had one more session where we learned what types of headlines are good and bad for a landing page and how it depends on the users we are targeting.

Trying out GPT3 API for a project

In this project what I basically did was added a text area and integrated GPT API so that it will answer the prompt user input. Now I want to learn how we can fine-tune the result we get from the API.

Achievements Unlocked: Reflecting on What I Accomplished in the First 14 Days of 2023

Improving my technical writing

I participated in Crio's program to create micro bytes on different technical topics and I was among the top two performers and won Skullcandy Wireless Over-Ear Headphones as a prize.

Micro bytes are basically learn by doing tutorials. I created Micro byte on different topics including

1. Managing branches in Git: Where I discussed Trunk and feature-based development.

2. Promises in Javascript: Here I covered what is a Promise in JavaScript and how to create a promise.

3. Static code analysis with Sonar Cloud: I demonstrated how static code analysis work along with its use cases.

4. Pagination in React: Here I guided users to create a Pagination feature using MUI pagination component.

5. Understanding Feature Toggle: In this micro byte I wrote about what is a feature toggle and the different ways we can create a feature toggle.

6. Introduction to Long Polling: I used Nodejs and created a basic demonstration of what is long polling and how long polling works.

7. Writing ADRs: In this micro byte I outlined different contents of Architectural decision records and created a sample ADR.

What I read during this time.

• I read the journey other devs shared in DevRetro 2022 blog. These blogs were my inspiration to start writing weekly personal retrospective.

Interesting things I watched during this period:

1. GrowthX Demo Day

I joined the GrowthX demo day where different members of top companies shared their stories and strategy for revenue-led growth. It was a good experience to understand how big companies handle different situations.

2. K-drama: Unlock My Boss

Well, this is something related to entertainment but still, it is an interesting k-drama related to AI so I am sharing it here.

Silver lining CEO creates an AI algorithm using Deep learning for Self-driving cars but something happens to him during this process and only two employees can have a conversation with him using his phone as he is trapped there.

The Road Ahead

That's it for this blog. This week I am planning to learn more about GitHub action and I am also participating in FuelerThreadChallenge to write a Twitter thread for 7 days currently I am on day 3 so will write more threads for the next 4 days.

Also, I want to continue the nights and weekends journey for more two weeks and build more projects.

Thank you for reading so far, I am excited to see what all new things I learn this week and I hope the new year has been as enlightening for you as it has been for me.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter