Dev Retro 2022: Journey in review

At the state of Ikigai ❤️

Introduction

Hey guys, I am Dhanush N, currently, a full-stack software engineer with 4+ years of experience mostly focused on backend development and DevOps. I am currently learning AWS and system design. I've had a lot of exposure to different technologies as a result of my work at a startup and have also learned many other things from my interests. So let's have a review of how my 2022 went 🙂

My background

I was from a tier 3 college, and when I was in my 2nd year, I remember that there was the first coding contest in my college, which was used for shortlisting people for a placement aspect. I was an above-average academic student at the time, but when it came to coding, I was unable to solve the problem in a minimal time frame. I took Computer Science and Engineering, which was purely based on my interest, but competitive programming was something that challenged me. I love being challenged, From then on, I continued to improve my problem-solving abilities by completing numerous challenges on various platforms, and I grew steadily.

My Job

When I first got placed in a company, I worked in the service sector for a year and was then moved to the product sector. More than working in the service sector, I loved working in the product sector and keeping myself updated on various tools and technologies. Since I was in a startup, I've worked with a variety of technologies, including React, Node.js, Elasticsearch, Redis, MongoDB, and others.

2022 Learnings

In early 2022, I was transferred to a new tech stack, Cube Js, which was used to build analytical visualization. Our main database was MongoDB, and it was very difficult to adapt it to our business logic. I had to debug things and learn a bit about AWS instances and how communication between servers happens to retrieve data more quickly. The work we did with our team, which I was leading, made us reduce the slowness of rendering things with the available tech stack from several minutes to less than 5 seconds by scaling and optimizing the code. Apart from this, I have solved many server issues, done many code-level optimizations, and also helped many other developers.

Apart from that, I was introduced to many other aspects of technology, such as Elasticsearch, a few machine learning algorithms, typescript, AWS Athena, AWS RDS, AWS Glue, AWS OpenSearch, and so on. Also, apart from Javascript and Node.js, I fiddle around with various Python scripts to automate my tasks and a few other side projects, and I've also started learning rust.

I have created some opensource projects and also contributed to a few, some of them are in my Github

I earned numerous profile badges, which are now displayed on my holopin board. Also, my github profile has gained much traction.

I also planned to create a portfolio, but I wanted it to be unique, so I finally came up with a unique portfolio site. Do view it and I hope you will like it 😊

I have also written blogs on various platforms, like dev.to, geeksforgeeks, medium, hashnode, hackernoon etc. I planned to solve coding problems on a daily basis, but I was not consistent the entire year. I have consistently solved coding problems to improve my DSA without missing a day in the last two months, and I hope to continue in this manner in the coming year 2023.

I have mentored a few people and guided them in their programming knowledge.

Apart from tech, I have been a chess player and participated in in-person chess tournaments in my locality twice this year and many online tournaments, and this has helped me in real-life decision-making as well.

Despite doing all these, I have also been consistent enough to exercise daily and I have been consistently going to the gym for the past year and hope to continue it as well.

Key takeaways

• At the beginning of the blog post, I would have mentioned the state of Ikigai, which purely means a state of being, I feel I am in the state of Ikigai according to me these 4 factors

  • What do I love?

  I love problem-solving like sudoku, chess, cube solving etc. This interest has also made me solve technological problems by code by identifying loopholes and exploring the right aspect

  • What I am good at?

  I am good at problem-solving as I have taken a lot of effort from my college days practicing skills as well as solving many problems of my peers as well as my own.

  • What can I be paid for?

  Technology has paid me for what I work etc. Apart from tech I was able to earn money playing chess as well.

  • What does the world need?

  I feel my world is my family. I can be with them and support them in various aspects and also able to help some people in programming and few have landed good jobs. Was able to guide and help a lot of people online with their opensource contributions and also a few guidelines regarding technology aspects.

• The Tech industry keeps on changing never stick with a particular programming language or tool, learn to learn and unlearn things

• Never compare yourself with anyone, compare yourself only with your previous self and do things that you like or are passionate about. I got what I like in case anyone else has not got what they like to approach it with interest for having a better outcome.

• Never stress too much in the end it is health that matters.

• I always compare the tech industry to chess. In chess a 12-year-old chess player can win a person at age 35, similarly, the skillset varies. Always be curious and in tech, your experience may matter but mostly the projects and skills value more than your experience.

What’s Next

I am purely enjoying my work and challenging myself not to settle in a comfort zone, even if it is comfortable. I'm planning to write more blogs consistently, at least 12 for the next year, do more opensource, develop my skills to the next level, complete some of my existing fun side projects, and also achieve a few other accomplishments as well. To fulfill my future aspirations and goals, I must constantly improve myself and learn new things, as well as help others.

Thank you so much if you have read it so far.

If you liked reading this blog, please don't forget to like ❤️, comment 👌🏻 and share 🤩 in order to show your support as your support means a lot to me.