Bizarre, topsy-turvy,....& what not! The year that was 2022 - A look back.

DevRetro 2022

📆 The year 2022 finally withered away & we've already reached the first weekend of 2023! It's been a rather bizarre journey for me since I started coding in earnest, back in 2020 - after the pandemic struck. It took me another year for me to join Twitter - although I had been already benefitting from #techTwitter with the amount of 🧵 I had saved. freeCodeCamp, Youtube, & Peertube were my primary sources to learn how to code, back then. Fast-forward to 2021 & I had pretty much blundered my way through a plethora of tutorials, & self-doubt - interspersed with weeks of doing zilch. Pretty messed up, right?

By the end of the year, I had already sorted out quite a few things I needed to do if I wanted to become a self-taught developer -

  • Increasing my online presence (still not there, yet!)

  • Networking

  • Just build something & get it out there in the wild already!

  • Effective time management (yeah, about that ...)

🟦 Started off with the #100DaysOfCode challenge after joining Twitter.

Day 1: #100DaysOfCode
Completed the Basic HTML and HTML5 modules in freeCodeCamp. On to CSS now! pic.twitter.com/Xn7UCB3H8V

— ⌨️ u-nixed-!t📱️ (@thefoss_m) June 16, 2021

🟦 Made this with HTML & CSS on Codepen

🎯Day-28 #100DaysOfCode
📌 With love, from #CSS3 .❤️ pic.twitter.com/QrUzpfDVor

— ⌨️ u-nixed-!t📱️ (@thefoss_m) July 18, 2021

🟦 And this, too!

pic.twitter.com/bjxP425p6N

— ⌨️ u-nixed-!t📱️ (@thefoss_m) August 26, 2021

So, yeah; I'd then progressed to participating in online Hackathons, like the one held in September, 2021 :

Hashnode Hackathon 2021

It's been a whirlwind since.

I've since, up until November, 2022; suffered several setbacks on the personal front (lost some friends & a few loved ones in the Pandemic), & also started freelancing as a Front-end Web Developer. I've landed a few clients too!

Gonna elaborate more on what exactly I did to start freelancing as a web developer in a future article, but I'm not gonna lie - it was extremely hard & mentally exhausting, at least for me.

But I learned loads from that experience - NextJS, GatsbyJS, & TailwindCSS were extremely useful when I got to building Landing Pages, Portfolios & even Logos!, for several clients, after getting into freelance web development.

That's all from me on my journey as a self-taught developer up until 2022.

Cheers ! 🎊