Hey folks!!! This year of '22 has been quite an important year for me as I joined my college and also learned to code. It has been a journey of lots of 0 and 1 and in the process, I have also learned the use case of 0 and 1. So, let's wrap up the year '22.
The Origins
Let's start from the very beginning from where it all began, (Flashback…) Hey Everyone I am Vishal great to see you here, today (3rd of Jan) is my first day of college and I have a lot of mixed feelings going on in my mind. You might have also felt the same when you joined your school, college, or university. First Day gives you a lot like the opportunity to make new friends, meet your seniors & know your college and whatnot.
Meanwhile, I started developing a slight interest in programming, computers and all the latest trending technology around me and also learnt all the fancy terms for a freshman-year student like “Blockchain”, “AI”, “Metaverse” and whatnot. And for people, I am a guy who didn't even know what programming is and had never in my life coded or written even one line of code.
Getting Started…(On your mark, Set…)
Like every college student, In his/her freshman year faces the most difficult choice he/she has to make which is to choose a programming language or a set of skill sets which can fetch them a 50LPA job and get placed in their Dream companies. To clear out this he/she goes to of the best places in the world of guidance which are YouTube and College Seniors. They are one of the best and worst (sorry seniors) guides for you some might change your life (I meant in both the sense...OK) but still for a naive freshman student like me, they are all that it takes to start.
“Which programming language do you prefer?”, “What are the resources to study?”, and “Is coding for me?”. In my opinion, there is no such Ideal language or any particular skill set that is For you. Rather, It depends on how early you can start, cause starting early will give you a slight edge over others.
So instead of starting a proper language like C++ or Java or Python, I chose Web development. Yeah, Even to this day, I don't know why I started with it. This was just a random thing which eventually turned out good for me.
<h1>hi!! Everyone</h1>
By now I had decided what to start with now it was about how to start. Here comes the next most difficult choice a student has to make and as usual “Bhaiya (brother), where should I learn web development? “ Or YouTube Search: “best courses for web development for beginners” and here I got to know a lot of stuff like Udemy, Coursera, freecodecamp, etc, etc. By now I had done my research from all the sources like YouTube and Udemy. I got to know about ZTM (Zero to Mastery) through an overview of the course, I had fallen for Andria (founder of ZTM) teaching style.
So by now, I had an idea of what I am going to learn and how I am going to do it. Now comes the major part, the Execution!!. Every Idea without Action is just a talk that no one wants to listen to.
Can we Skip to the Good Tech Part </>
By now I figured out everything to do from where to do it and was full of high motivation. And with that enthusiasm, I learnt HTML and got to know structure of it how it works and everything I was like it was just so easy, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Then came CSS! Which is used to style the HTML Tags, I kind of liked it at starting and understood that it was a huge topic, and it cannot be mastered, Rather you can just be fluent in it.
After learning the Basics of HTML and CSS I started making projects as I wanted to clear my concept so made projects like Landing Pages, Basic forms and also learnt about various CSS libraries like Bootstrap & Tailwind but never learnt them completely. So by now, I felt things are going well and was growing with the flow never did I know what I am going to face next it was JavaScript at starting it was nice I understood everything about variables, arrays, strings and objects. But after that comes the concept of Scoping, Async/Await, ES modules, and DOM manipulation and for a guy new to technology these were quite high-level stuff for me to process at once but by hook or crook by now I had discovered W3schools which cleared my major concepts of JavaScript. But after doing this, I started falling in love with the process.
The Decisions
By now things were going well, I had completed a good portion as a beginner and it was quite overwhelming. So with that motivation, I was about to start React.js, a frontend JavaScript library. But, not every climb to the goal is only high, we have to face low too. Now there was a startup built by my seniors in college and I got to know they need a frontend developer for building their web application, I was like yeah! I am a Frontend Developer (To this date, I laugh thinking about it) so that was a kind of technical interview and I who has never in his life even given a proper talk in my school assembly. Yeah, I was not selected and they being polite asked me to prepare and give it another shot. I thought about it for a few days and made a decision not to go for it again, It was a quite difficult decision for me. But there was a lot to learn from it, it was a time to reflect on my learning.
The phase after the interview was more difficult, I was not willing to study any of this stuff again and was about to quit like it was not for me. Now here comes the role of your friends who pushed me from that rough phase and motivated me at that very moment. I was delighted to have you guys. Thank you, guys.
Comebacks
By then, I completely recovered from that phase of not doing anything and started my journey back with a greater motivation of doing better. So, I brushed up on my concepts and started with React.js and yeah, in a week or two I was back on my flow and learnt about functions, classes, components and various libraries used to build a web application.
This made me stronger and think that life is all about winning or learning from failure. It's simple, either you get it or you learn from it.
Open Source
Now, as I was learning more about the frontend and learning new stuff. Here I would like to credit Ishan Sharma (YouTuber) for introducing me to Kunal Kushwaha, I guess this was the best thing that happened in my learning graph. I learned about Open Sources, GSoC, MLH, DevOps, Remote jobs and also about Dev vs CP. Guys, he's just an amazing person, he made many things clear in my life. For this, I would like to take this moment to thank him for whatever he has done.
By now I was done with frontend of Web Dev but had no major experience in it. Yeah, I had projects, but most of them were tutorials or from the courses which I followed(ZTM). With the help of Kunal Learnt more about Git & GitHub, I had enough experience that I was knowing about PRs, basic git commands and about open source. Now comes my first open-source competition, HACKTOBERFEST.
HACKTOBERFEST
HACKTOBERFEST is a month along open-source hackathon where you contribute to various open-sources projects. For me, it was a quite new experience for me. At starting things were difficult, but project maintainers are too helpful as they helped in each and every step. Merger conflict was one of my first errors while pushing to repos. These errors and various experience helped me become a better developer and the same time a beginner in open source community.
Yeah, also I got my first ever swag that is Hacktober '22 tee shirt, Eagerly!!! Waiting for it.
Socials
Various platforms like discord, Slack and twitter helps you to connect with like-minded people who are learning technologies from various resources but one key thing which connects all the developers (Acc. to me) are bugs and errors. And ohh!! Boy, the number of errors I got resolved is just unimaginable. Even for the smallest of doubts or the crashing of React app, all the errors are resolved. The people are also too kind and supportive, so I would like to thank each one who helped me. I would also make sure that I also help back to the people who are new to this.
Tech Meetups
In November, I got an opportunity to go for my first ever tech meetup at Microsoft Office, Bengaluru for Azure Ai/ML day which was whole another level of experience. Where you meet peers of other college, you get different perspective, learn about new technologies, the best part is that the people who work in such companies give you broader perspective of thinking which helps in your learning graph. Overall, a great experience which helped me to think about the larger picture.
Ending on a High
Uff!! This year had been one of the best years in my learning and unlearning graph. Learnt a lot, had amazing experiences and what not. But, it is always important to finish the things on high so that the upcoming years have a better base and strong foundation. So, let's hope we have a great year ahead
Thank you readers for staying up till here, hope you also have great year and let's meet again in '23 Un-Wrapped.
Connect me on LinkedIn, GitHub
Singing off
Vishal.