As 2024 has come to an end, I find myself reflecting on a year packed with learning, growth, challenges, and achievements. This post is my way of documenting the journey—the projects I worked on, the hurdles I overcame, the lessons I learned, and my hopes for 2025.
What I Achieved in 2024
Major Projects
Grocery Delivery App(Still in progress): A cross-platform application featuring separate apps for users, delivery partners, and business owners. This project was my first deep dive into designing for real-world scalability integrating live updates of location of delivery partners which required to be optimized and scalable.
Class to Cloud This EdTech application transformed offline coaching institutes into digital ecosystems, supporting lecture videos, notes, and batch management. It was built with React Native (without Expo) and Django as the backend. This project taught me a lot about video streaming, handling PDFs, and making apps modular for customization by clients.
- FinFlow A feature-rich expense tracker that emphasized user experience and efficient data management. Creating FinFlow required experimenting with different database architectures and real-time financial calculations. (https://finflow.divyanshulohani.xyz)
- SyncDrawGuess A doodle-guessing game designed for fun and real-time interaction. It tested my knowledge of WebSockets and managing multiple clients simultaneously. (Github)
- Hackathon: Peddiehacks 2024 My first hackathon, where my team built a “TikTok for Beats” app—an innovative platform for beat-driven content creation. This experience sharpened my rapid prototyping and team collaboration skills. It tought me how to build projects under presure of a deadline and while working with different people from different timezones
- E-commerce Platform Designed and developed a full-fledged e-commerce website for Maa Kali Griha Udyog, focusing on performance and seamless user experience. It was the first experience working with different third party payment providers and working with their APIs and integrating it PhonePe has very good customer service.
- My own portfolio site with blogs feature: https://www.divyanshulohani.xyz/
First open source contributions: I participated in the Hacktober Fest 2024 along with the oss.gg initiative which was fun contributing to open source. It helped me to learn about how real world code is written and deployde production systems. Majorly contributed to Formbricks: Its a forms creator app and excellent for creating forms at the go.
- Small Yet Impactful Projects
- Creative Venture Released my first song, Lapata, marking a milestone in my personal creative journey. (Listen to it now if you haven't)
Challenges I Faced
It doesn’t always go smooth. 2024 presented its fair share of obstacles that tested my problem-solving abilities and resilience. Each challenge came with valuable lessons, shaping the developer I’m becoming. Here are the key hurdles I faced:
- I had to completely rewrite an app after realizing Expo did not support a critical module required for my project. This was frustrating but taught me to better evaluate dependencies during the planning phase.
- Another app had to be rewritten due to Next.js limitations, specifically around server-side rendering optimizations. Encountered significant performance bottlenecks while working with - Next.js on larger projects. Tweaking lazy-loading strategies and optimizing API calls became a recurring challenge due to Next JS changing nature I had to learn new things this is in a good way but was frustrating sometimes.
- Implementing WebSockets to synchronize multiple clients in real-time for projects like SyncDrawGuess wasn’t straightforward. Debugging connection issues and ensuring smooth interactions across different devices was a steep learning curve.
- Hosting services on VPS and AWS came with its own set of issues, from setting up SSL certificates to troubleshooting container orchestration problems. These challenges, however, were pivotal in honing my DevOps skills.
What I Learned
Technical Skills
- Streaming Techniques: Gained an in-depth understanding of different video/audio streaming methods, optimizing for bandwidth and latency. Technologies used included FFmpeg for transcoding and HLS for adaptive bitrate streaming.
- Queueing Systems & Pub/Sub Models: Learned to handle task queues and event-driven architectures for scalable backend systems using Redis, Celery, and RabbitMQ.
- Real-Time Databases & WebSockets: Mastered techniques to maintain synchronized states across multiple clients in real-time. Utilized - Firebase Realtime Database and implemented WebSocket servers with Socket.IO and Django Channels.
- Hosting on VPS and AWS: From spinning up servers to deploying Docker containers, this year was a crash course in cloud hosting. Worked extensively with Nginx, Docker Compose, and EC2 instances.
- Algorithms: Explored various sorting algorithms and their real-world applications, improving data processing efficiency in several projects. Tools like NumPy and Lodash helped optimize these operations.
- Database Mastery: Deepened my understanding of SQL with PostgreSQL and adopted MongoDB as a go-to for flexible, modern database solutions, leveraging its aggregation framework.
Soft Skills
- Adaptability: Learned to pivot quickly when facing technical roadblocks.
- Time Management: Balanced multiple projects while keeping a steady focus on academics.
- Collaboration: Participated in hackathons and open-source projects, improving my ability to work with diverse teams.
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