Hello there! 👋

I'm jay, a computer science undergraduate in India.

I read a few blog posts of dev retro 2022 and got inspired by people and their journey as a developer this year. So here I am sharing my learnings, experiences and journey as a developer in 2022.

Introduction

My college is in a small city 'Durg' which is in Chhattisgarh, India and I also live here.

Being from a small city the exposure and awareness are not at all there.

The first three semesters of my college were in online mode and as our college is also not good, I wasn't aware of anything at all: what to learn and how to get started in coding. I only learned a little bit about a few subjects that were there in the syllabus and learned C language from youtube and the book that was provided by the college.

Getting started to learn

I heard about web development from here and there, so I thought to learn this from youtube. But for about 2-3 months I was just learning HTML and CSS only and that too there was no progress. I don't know what the hell was I doing. Then one of my friends told me to take a full stack course from udemy.

Along with this till now I got to know that Data structures and algorithms are important to learn. I came to know about Kunal Kushwaha's channel on youtube and his Java+DSA playlist and java were also there in my 4th-semester syllabus, so started learning this also along with web development.

Challenges faced in learning

Frontend development

When I learned HTML and CSS and also finished half of the javascript from this course, I got to know about Flexbox, Grid and media queries. I was like I haven't learned these in CSS what is this?

Now I realised that as the course was full stack it didn't cover the concepts properly.

So I needed to learn it properly.

Data structures and algorithms

At starting I was able to do DSA well and solved questions properly. I have solved 50 questions on Leetcode till now. In the beginning, it is quite easy to solve the questions But then at a particular point, I just felt stuck. So I reached out to people on Twitter and asked them how should I learn DSA effectively. I got insights from a lot of people and what I ultimately understood was that the only way to learn DSA is by doing DSA.

I wasn't able to manage both DSA and Development both along with college stuff. So I left DSA and started focusing solely on the development side for a month.

So, now I am learning javascript at present but I also need to do DSA along with it, at least one hour a day. I hope I will be able to do both in 2023.

Started learning Frontend development

So again as I first started from youtube, went there to learn flexbox etc. which was not covered in the course. And again the same thing wasted a few days with no progress.

Got right path

But then as I was connected on Twitter with folks like me, I got to know about the responsive design of Jonas Schmetdmann on Udemy. So I enrolled in that course and it was worth it. I was consistent in learning and learned the concepts very well.

In this course, I also build my first fully responsive project using HTML,CSS and javascript called Omni-food which is a food website and also deployed it using Github.

https://jayk-gupta.github.io/omnifood/

Made the first project from scratch

After this, I made a clone of DoorDash a food delivery website. I was just looking for website inspirations and I landed on this one. I made it from scratch just by looking at the original website. One thing of which I was still not confident was responsiveness. I haven't made this project responsive.

https://jayk-gupta.github.io/Doordash-Food-website/

My portfolio wesbite

Now I decided to make my portfolio website and I had to make it complete with responsiveness. So, I started looking for other developers' portfolio websites for inspiration. I came across jacekjeznach site, I liked his design and color scheme.

Now I started to make my own by looking at his site, every day I worked on some section of the site.

I faced many challenges while making this site. For instance, there is a scroll-down animation element, and it took me around 2 hours to figure that out to make it work properly. It was the first one in which I had to apply media queries to make it responsive, it took a lot of time to do that.

I learned a lot through this project.

https://jaykgupta.netlify.app/

Now I am learning Javascript from the same instructor at Udemy.

Learning in Public

As I was learning from Kunal's playlist, he always said to learn in public and share on Twitter, hashtags etc. So I thought to start using Twitter and share my learning there.

I started #100daysofCode on Twitter in May and completed it in September.

It helped me a lot to maintain consistency and also keep track of my journey.

Like now for this blog, I went to see my first tweet which I did on Twitter.😅

Community on Twitter

As I started using Twitter I connected with so many amazing folks across the globe and also with people like me who are not in good college but still hustling and learning. The people here are good, supportive and help each other.

I reached out to a few people and asked them how should I learn things, asked my queries and also got to know them, and their journey.

I never knew that the community here could be so awesome. As I don't have any friends or seniors, Twitter helped me a lot in my journey and is important to me.

The thread and spaces are one of the best things here. I learn a lot of new things from threads. Spaces help in learning about people's experiences, their journeys, getting guidance etc. I love Twitter Spaces! 😃

I am using Twitter for the past 8 months and it's been amazing for me.💛

It has helped me a lot in my journey.

This was all about my journey as a developer in 2022.

I hope I can learn more things and be more productive in 2023.

Happy New Year to everyone!😊

#DevRetro2022