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How was your 2025?

Jess Lee on December 29, 2025

Soo... 2025 is basically over. How'd it go for you? Here are two of my own DEV-centric highlights that come to mind: I'm proud to share we laun...
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Hadil Ben Abdallah

2025 has been quite a ride on DEV! 🎉 This screenshot describes it all 😄 a year full of joy, learning, and connections in this amazing community… 💙

Hadil Ben Abdallah dev.to wrap 2025

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Prasoon Jadon

can you tell mire about this screenshort , means which site is this ?

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Hadil Ben Abdallah
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Prasoon Jadon

Thank you

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Hadil Ben Abdallah

Welcome 🙌🏻

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Ben Halpern The DEV Team

A lot of necessary evolution — exhilarating at times and overwhelming at others.

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Pascal CESCATO

2025 was, for me, the year I truly discovered AI.

Not in an abstract way, but as a real tool — for document analysis, report generation, conceptualizing ideas, and actually building applications.

It was also the year I discovered this platform, dev.to, where I genuinely feel at home. I published around twenty articles here and, more importantly, had meaningful exchanges with people who brought me a lot. I’m thinking of you, Jess, of course, but also authors like Cesar, Sylwia, or Aaron Rose, to name just a few.

I’m really looking forward to the challenge announced for January 1st, 2026 — which might well be the year I take a more active part in one of these challenges… this one or another 🙂

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Sylwia Laskowska

I feel the same way - maybe it’s finally time for me to get involved in some of these challenges 😄

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Cesar Aguirre

Thanks for the mention, Pascal. "I want to thank the Academy..." :P I really enjoyed your post about Agile. A good read!

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Aaron Rose

Cheers Pascal. Happy New Year! ✨❤️

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Jess Lee The DEV Team

Aw, thanks so much for sharing! @-mentioning @canro91 and @aaron_rose_0787cc8b4775a0 to make sure they see this 😄

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Luis Faria

Looking forward for the 1st of Jan announcement!!

And I think it is fair to share that three of the most cool additions to my 2025 edition were:

  • learn in public: it has helped me tremendously to understand concepts, reflect and evolve as a developer and person
  • started a masters' degree course, open-sourcing the course's content, assessments and apps
  • MERN stack: was able to launch +3 projects to deepen my knowledge on the stack
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Daniel Nwaneri

2025 taught me that teaching compounds faster than building.

I spent Nov-Dec documenting my work with MCP servers, Cloudflare Workers AI, and production RAG systems.

Result: 1,500+ readers on one article, GitHub forks and developers I've never met using my code in production.

The craziest part? The more I shared, the better my own code became. Writing forces clarity.

2026: Keep the feedback loop going. Build → Document →
Share → Learn → Repeat.

(PS: Dropping something today about companies accidentally
violating HIPAA with ChatGPT. Found 50+ cases on Upwork
alone...)

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Web Developer Hyper

I started using DEV Community about a year ago. I kept learning new IT skills and sharing them with the DEV Community. I wouldn’t have been able to keep learning without the DEV Community, so thank you very much for such a great developer community!😊

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Paweł Świątkowski

For me quite unexpectedly it became a year of open source. I was added to Hanami/dry-rb/ROM maintainers team and later this year got a job as Elixir OSS tooling developer.

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Sylwia Laskowska

It was objectively a terrible year for me. Fortunately, toward the end I rediscovered myself through writing and creativity - including here on dev.to 🙂 I think I can finally look to 2026 with hope 🌟

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Varshith V Hegde

Almost the same story 🫠.I discovered my passion for treks , climbing and solo travel in the second half of the year..

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Cesar Aguirre

Since last year, writing have become my therapy too. Really enjoyed your posts about jQuery outliving modern tools :)

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Sylwia Laskowska

Thank you so much, Cesar 😊 I was just reading your comment earlier - and I’m really sorry for your loss. I also lost someone close recently. Writing has become a kind of therapy for me too, helping to process things and keep moving forward. And if someone actually wants to read it on top of that, that’s just wonderful 💛

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Cesar Aguirre • Edited

Jess, no new year challenge? 😱 I developed the habit of writing a "year in review" every year, so I'm doing it in the next few days anyway.

This was a year of ups and downs:

  • I will remember it as the year I became a writer. I published my first book. (Link in bio 🙈) It got more traction than expected.
  • But I will also remember it as one of the saddest years after losing a closed family member 🥹

A year of mix feelings.

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Ashwin Mehta

2025 was a year of learning by building for me.

I explored AI, GenAI, and real-world prompt engineering, published my first dev.to blog, participated in hackathons, and started sharing my journey more openly with the developer community.

Not everything worked, but every experiment taught me something new.
Looking forward to going deeper into open source, writing consistently, and building tools that actually help developers in 2026 🚀

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Athreya aka Maneshwar • Edited

Learned a lot of new things, improved existing half a** knowledge.

Just did well altogether! Need to do better!!

Here's my wrap!

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Kiran Naragund

🫶

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Bhavesh Kukreja • Edited

Did many things for the first time. A few of them:

  1. First full stack project
  2. First Internship
  3. First blog (You can read on my profile :P)
  4. First Hackathon
  5. First Contest

I didn't achieve anything great in any of these, but I feel satisfied from what I experienced and learned. Peace <3

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Anshu Mandal

It was fantastic! Thanks to dev.to platform I finally was able to build my dream pc by winning two hackathons this year.

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Hadil Ben Abdallah

Congratulations 😍🎉

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Ryan Bae

I started Swift ~6 months ago, and I've just constantly making tiny languages for fun. Just because. Then on like early November, I started my submission for the 2027 Swift Student Challenge. It's an interpreted language that revolves around a concept: explicit control with everyday abstractions. Basically, it gives you those tiny things that make your life a bit easier, but still like gives you a lot of control.

I've gotten the core AST done, I just need the add-ons like type conversion, inputting, and other stuff in it. The lexer is rock-solid; I'm not changing it. That means right now, I'm mining away on the parser. It uses a technique I made- disambiguating, merging, and then doing the recursive step (for nested parenthesis and nested stuff) for making the tree. What I mean by disambiguating is that - can be interpreted as unary minus (-u) or binary minus (-b). Similarly, for '.' , it can be interpreted as member access/dot notation (.m) or a decimal point (.d)

I think the UI is mostly good; just need to complete the educational part for my submission. So overall, I think 2025 has been a pretty fun year!

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Henry Ramirez

That’s impressive progress for such a short time. Designing your own AST and parser logic forces you to really understand language fundamentals. The disambiguation approach for unary/binary operators is especially interesting. Best of luck with the Swift Student Challenge — sounds like a project with real depth.

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Ryan Bae

Thanks! I'm currently stuck in the merger phase; I'm stuck whether to make a whole enum for this, what precedence the unary minus and dot notation should go (I'm more inclined towards dot then unary minus), but overall, progress is going swimmingly :)

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Henry Ramirez

"I’d definitely lean towards Dot having higher precedence (. > -).

Most devs intuitively read -obj.prop as -(obj.prop). If you make the Unary Minus bind tighter, you break the mental model of C-style/JS languages and invite confusion. Sticking to the Principle of Least Astonishment is usually the safest bet here!

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Ryan Bae

That was good advice! I've gotten all the core logic in, but now I'm starting to get why parsers are so complicated: chained right-associativity unary operators (basically ---2, which is technically valid) are bugging me. Because something like -u need to wait for the next token thats a term, my blind parser/merger just doesn't get it...

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Karl Castillo

2025 is a year of self improvement and realization. I focused on non-technical skills that make me well-rounded.

I started learning about cooking, and taking care of my cooking tools. This expanded to sharpening our almost 10 year old kitchen knives using a whetstone. My biggest cooking achievement was making a beef bourguignon following Julia Child's recipe. Being able to create something with your own hands that you can EAT is an amazing feeling.

I also started taking care of myself a bit more. Making sure I'm well groomed and healthy physically and mentally as often as I can. This might be obvious for some but sometimes you forget to do these things in the midst of having a lot of responsibilities in and out of work.

These things might not have taught me new tech, new tools or new language but it sets me up for the coming year to be sound and refreshed. This is more important as I'll be starting a new position this coming year.

Actually, I did learn new tech. I learned Svelte which I plan to use in my new position!

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Hoang Nguyen

I’ve never felt the pressure to learn continuously like I have in 2025, literally something new and useful drops almost every day just to keep up with the frontier. It’s exhausting at times, but also exhilarating.

AI is massively amplifying engineers: the iteration speed is insane now. We can prototype, debug, refactor, and explore ideas significantly faster than even a couple years ago. Failing fast has never been this cheap or this educational.

About the fundamentals, they matter more than ever. Strong foundations in systems thinking, clean abstractions, algorithms, and software craft are what let us steer these powerful (but still stochastic and imperfect) AI tools effectively. The better your basics, the bigger the leverage you get from AI.

It’s like having a supercharged apprentice that needs a skilled master to guide it. Keep the craft sharp, and the upside is enormous.

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Siarhei

2025 was a huge year for me. I decided to go deep into working with AI, and it changed everything.

That led to goman.live. Managing content, translations, and prompts was becoming a mess, so I built my own tool to fix it using MCP. I use it myself every day to run my other projects. It really works.

Life got busy too-I became a father! To keep up with my son, I "vibecoded" zaspa, a simple baby tracker. It was fun to build something that helps my own family.

I also started writing articles this year, sharing thoughts on topics I care about. It has been a great year for building and creating.

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Varshith V Hegde

This year I have divided into 2 parts
Part 1 was worst year of my life
Part 2 was the redemption.
Both in personal life and my tech life .
Planning to do a 2025 wraped blog have too much to share

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Warren Jitsing

Good. Started what I think is a good educational content stream for juniors to skill up. All in a reproducible environment github.com/InfiniteConsult/FromFir...

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Erica

A year of extremes. Started college for CS, found work I love, made new friends, got married on Hallow's Eve -- and also lost my grandmother in March and my dad today. Learning that progress and grief can exist at the same time, life keeps moving.

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Daniel Coturel

TL;DR good

2025 was a good year, as every year. But in terms of software development, in my case was specially good. I have a small team, and we provide functional services over a local ERP here in Argentina. We also develop customizations and small pieces of software towards this ERP. We are a certified partner.

Back in 2021, I started to request the ERP factory if they could include providing a full modern remote API in order to improve integrations capability.

In 2023, given the factory didn't include or planned to include this in the roadmap, I started the development of such an API. I was then a little anxious to start using NoCode tools for process modeling and orchestration, and identified this was an important milestone towards it.

In 2024 I presented this API gateway.

Now ending 2025, this API has already been installed in 8 customers, each representing an integration project. 2 of them are related with AI, being the first AI-integrations of this ERP. The other 6 are more traditional projects.

This image shows my billing in 2025. The API related concepts (services and licences) represent a small portion in the context of a running bussiness, but growing.

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VIMAL KUMAR

Every year I used to start projects and not able to finish, but this year I have finished multiple projects like webnfc.org and biodata maker.org

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Amara Graham

I took a career break and refocused my time and energy on all things me. So I'm really proud of this gap in my GitHub contributions.

I read twice as many books as I did last year and found a really incredible new company and role. 2025 was incredibly difficult and I'm looking forward to putting it behind me.

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Princeofgrace • Edited

Keep being an incredible mentor, teacher, leader and thank you so much for always being here for new coders. You're blessed 🙏❤️
Happy new year queen 👑❤️💐

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Brent Ochieng

Probably the year i never thought i would have. I started the without a job. chose to start programming from scratch with python. delved into data analytics, sql, excel, powerbi. Got some certifications. And here i am. Hoping to start javascript, and Rust in 2026

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Ankit Rattan

I’ve learned an incredible amount this year, especially regarding AI. I moved beyond just using tools to understanding the mechanics behind them—concepts I was completely unaware of earlier. My prompt engineering has evolved drastically; looking back at my chat logs from 2024, I honestly doubt if that was actually me! 😂

Beyond the learning, my team and I built some crazy projects. We lived for the hackathons—spending entire nights fueled by nothing but code and caffeine. But most importantly, I walked away with real life lessons that have prepared me to make 2026 my best year yet.

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Petry DeChamp Richardson

Broke into Nanosecond performance ;) Worlds fastest tech is what I seek.

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Warren Jitsing

It's a rabbit hole. After world's fastest tech you start seeking out the world's fastest cars and try to lower the latency of your takeoffs.

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Petry DeChamp Richardson

I don't think you quite understand what I mean by my post apparently. Perhaps I should add more. Or perhaps you should have just went to my profile and seen the actual value behind it. This is not a materialistic feature. This is a human first achievement. This is going to help humans more than the greedy pockets of others. I could care less for money other than I'll have enough to get exactly what I need done which is to do for myself, my family, and others. Nanosecond for the human is highly important and your comment shows that you lack awareness on the topic, in what you're actually stating your reply to.

I would love to spend time talking with you on what I'm actually doing versus what you thought.

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Emmanuel Uchenna

2025 was that redefining year for me. I made some wins, some losses, and put in more works. I documented my journey in my blog: 2025 Year in Review: The Wins, the Losses, and the Work No One Saw

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Nick Taylor
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Varshith V Hegde
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Rohan Kumar

2025 was a year of growth and learning. Improved my skills, gained experience, and stayed consistent toward my goals.

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Aditya

2025 was sort of roller coaster ride. I got to connect with lots of talented people, visited dev fests in India and gave a talk on "how can we leverage productivity with AI and MCP server".
Let's see what do we unfold in 2026?

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Parth G

The year 2025 was really great for our company! We have tried and tested hacks! developed things! Worked on our company's growth! At end it was a fruitful journey

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Alok Saini

A year of learning, challenges, and growth. 2025 helped me sharpen skills and build confidence.

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bint

During the initial months of 2025, I was a little bit lazy, confused about what I should do. What path should I adopt as a Career?

In the middle of the year, I got some clarifications, and finally I decided to stick with Technical Skills and helping others, and guiding them towards the benefits of learning hands-on skills in AI. I have benefited from CyberSecurity and AI skills even as an absolute beginner. During this year, I worked on some projects as a freelancer (with the grace of God).

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Giri Shaffaat Al

I learnt so many things in 2025.

IT infrastucture, cloud platform, web development stacks, and more. I also resigned from my first job and finally got another job as Cloud Engineer to level up my skills. Sure i'm still lack of technical skills, but i believe in 2026 is my year to improve!

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myroslav mokhammad abdeljawwad

very eventful to say the least

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Art light

It sounds like a really impactful year—launching 30 DEV challenges and growing the #weeklyretro culture is huge for keeping developers motivated and connected. I love the direction you’re taking, and I’m excited to see DEV become even more of a global hackathon hub in 2026.

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MrComputerScience • Edited

My 2025 was insanely stressful. But also rewarding. I'm thankful to have met many folks who are interested in studying AI. (I am obsessed with studying artificial intelligence and launched a weekly newsletter on AI news earlier this year. I'm shocked and honored that folks way smarter than me actually read it, including PhDs, CEOs, vibe coders, founders, and everyday folk who love AI or work with it professionally.) I hope 2026 is way more relaxing. But, I honestly find that unlikely. Writing a weekly newsletter is WAY more work than I thought. But, I won't stop now. Wishing everyone else a restorative, joyous holiday. (2026 will be exciting. Just hope it's not TOO exciting. If you catch my drift.)

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Umar Hayat

My 2025 was:
-> Full of Learnings and Errors
-> Buit few Good Habits, got rid of some bad ones
-> Time for taking action instead of overthinking
-> Projects building (But got to finish few)

Let's see what 2026 has brought us.
Alhamdullilah 🌟

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Brennan K. Brown

Surprisingly good! I started getting really serious about my coding again. I'd love to connect with anybody in the open-source JAMstack space: github.com/brennanbrown

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MiguelMJ

I've had a quick look at your website and I cn tell I have been researching lately about some topics you talk about, like indie web and such. I'll keep an eye on it!

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Dhruba Patra

A offline API Client - voiden.md

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Julien Avezou

2025 was a good year in general:

  • got promoted
  • launched my app Jots, which hit #3 for the day on PH
  • wrote more tech content
  • moved cities

In 2026 I want to grow my app and write more tech content consistently.
Happy New Year everyone!

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Arham Sayyed

It was Surprisingly Great!, It was one of the best years, since last half a decade,
I started my own startup, Build Incredibles which did really great as it's first year with absolute zero marketing!
Apart from that I learned Frontend Development, Tailwind, became really good at React Js,
Completed Next JS, along with a real world project on the same which ended up being used by more than 500+ participants & 60+ colleges all within less than a month!!!
I also completed around 10 Books, and The Alchemist was the absolute best book.
Became Member & then a volunteer of Mumbai's one of the best Hacker's Community, Haxnation Mumbai.
Met great people, Made new & amazing friends, and made unforgettable memories.
Truly grateful to god for this amazing year ❤️🚀⚡

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Paras 🧙‍♂️ • Edited

I was kind of sad at first about 2025 in general but then I sat down and began writing a reflection note and after ranting about the bad things, I started writing about the good things. And honestly, that was a great eye opener. Not only I had a lot of fun outside work, but also, I achieved a lot of cool goals in work itself. It felt great. It was not what I expected or planned but was definitely what I needed.

I believe the issue is we tend to remember bad things more than the good ones. This made me also setup a small google sheet + google forms for achievements log. Whenever I achieve something meaningful, I quickly add an entry via form. And if I find myself thinking what I even did in past few months, I can check that sheet and see my progress. It also motivates me do more stuff and not feel miserable.

I also kept that reflection note in my obsidian and planning to keep doing it once in a while.

Have to admit that there are still things I feel a little sad about, but all in all, this year helped me grow in a lot of areas and I am looking forward to another great year ahead.

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Ashish Prajapati
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Debajyati Dey

My 2025 wrapped!

dev wrapped for ddebajyati

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Hareesh Vemasani

2025 was a breakthrough year for me!

My biggest highlight was seeing ResumeUp.AI grow to 200,000+ users - what started as a project to help developers build better resumes turned into something that's genuinely helping people land jobs.

I added AI-powered ATS optimization, cover letter generation, and job tracking, linkedin optimisation features throughout the year.

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Kai swain

I finished my 6 month full time, full stack bootcamp and I have an internship making money to get me by but this year I want to take it to the next level, making apps and going deeper in my knowledge and understanding

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Enge-Olate

Good, very good!

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Mythos

Hello new here seems like a great space to explore .

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eConcord

Amazing

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ContentIn

Surprisingly good!

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Prasoon Jadon

good , we learn ,grow and write and that's more important

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Kunal '

Nice

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Mythos

Hello new here, I started a code journey.

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AwsKnowledgeHub

I finally finish and deploy for my application about sharing knowledge about AWS Service:
awsknowledgehub.com/