This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
As 2025 has started, I find myself looking back at everything I’ve learned in 2024, the obstacles I’ve faced, and the achievements that made the year special. It has been a year of growth, filled with exciting projects, technical challenges, and new opportunities that pushed me forward.
My Achievements in 2024
This year, I made several projects that helped me grow as a developer and leanred a lot of new stuff. Some of the key highlights include:
Building Projects: I worked on several full-stack projects using React, Node.js, and MongoDB. One of the most exciting projects was my YouTube clone backend using Express, where I learned a lot about backend authentication, handling cookies, and working with JWT.
Portfolio Website: I created my own portfolio website and hosted it on Vercel (https://ateendra.vercel.app). It showcases my skills and projects.
Real-time Chat App: I built a real-time chat application using React and Firebase, implementing features like user authentication, message state management with Zustand, and blocking/unblocking users for my college project (https://dam-three.vercel.app).
Contributing to Dev Challenges: I actively participated in some development challenges, including one where I created a Marvel character display webpage using the Marvel API, where one can search information about any marvel character.
Challenges I Faced
With all these achievements, I faced many challenges also and some of them I would like to share:
Debugging Complex Issues: Whether it was fixing the issues in my YouTube clone’s authentication flow or handling mobile navigation in the chat-app.
Managing College and Development Work: Balancing my academic responsibilities with my projects was tough.
State Management Issues: While working with Redux Toolkit, I had to carefully manage authentication state, ensuring that user sessions remained consistent across components.
Deployment Challenges: Hosting backend projects on Vercel and configuring environment variables (especially handling Google service account private keys) required troubleshooting and adjustments.
Lessons Learned in 2024
Persistence Pays Off: When develpoing these projects, many bugs and errors seemed unsolvable at first, but with a lot of patience and continuous debugging, at the end I was able to resolve them.
Community and Collaboration Matter: Whether it was through open-source contributions or discussions with fellow developers, I realized that it is very important to communicate with the tech community.
ChatGPT and Stack Overflow: Both the ChatGPT and Stack Overflow helped me a lot to fix those erros or the bugs in my code, and helped me to find those mistakes.
Time Management is Key: Juggling multiple projects alongside college work taught me to prioritize tasks efficiently.
User Experience Matters: While building all these projects, I found that focusing on UI/UX of the website is very important to make the website user friendly.
Looking Ahead to 2025
The year 2024 was a year of immense learning and growth. In 2025, I plan to dive deeper into advanced React concepts, explore backend optimizations, and take on more challenging development tasks. I also want to contribute more to open-source projects and participate in more hackathons and coding challenges.
I have leanred a lot in web dev and now I would focus on the Java and DSA. I would love to hear your suggestion and feedback.
Reflecting on this year, I feel grateful for all the experiences, both good and bad, that shaped my journey as a developer. Here’s to another year of growth and learning!
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