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2024: Year Review

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Published on December 31, 2024

Author: Meet Rajesh Gor

#developer-life

Introduction

It is the end of the year, and I write this yearly as I have been writing it since 2022. I get a lot of insights on the things after writing them. Let’s dive in for my journey from intern to full-time backend developer.

“2024, You had me in the first half”

No jokes here, I was scared as shit till May 31st, something special happened on May 31st, 2024 in my life!

Well, I got a full-time offer letter and the results of my bachelor’s degree which I passed with an 8.9 CGPA (not good but not bad either). If someone had to tell me an hour could change your life then this would be the day, exactly between 5 and 6 in the evening, I went from dropped shoulders to the happiest person in the world.

I can’t describe that feeling; it has a special place in my heart. From June 2023 to May 2024, I faced rejections left and right, but there was hope, a flicker of fire left that carried me here. I went from having nothing to being overwhelmed by so many great things that happened to me.

I am grateful to my parents, family, manager, friends, and Mother Nature for blessing me with whatever I receive in 2024 🥹

Gist

It was a good year, I learned a lot. I can say confidently I am more mature than I was a year ago. The year 2023 was a bit harsh for me, especially in the end, but that continued the effects for some time in 2024 as well. However, as I said, that single hour changed my life in a good way.

I became more of a problem thinker than a software developer, I was solving real-life problems at work. I faced challenges and failed at times, but I reflected, learned from them, and moved ahead. This is the aim of this post as well. I want to learn from this year. It feels overwhelming at first, but if I put it word by word, sentence by sentence, then it becomes crystal clear where I shined and where I fumbled, and the holes in the wall.

I feel like the first half of 2024 was the test of my patience and consistency. I was interning at Docsumo, I was assigned the task of one specific feature, then I got a few more tasks simultaneously and kept on chipping in bug fixes and understanding of the codebase, which by the end of one quarter I was given the sole responsibility of maintenance. That was not as boring as you might expect, it was challenging, it was about thinking through edge cases and solving the issues that the users were facing. This helped me develop my problem-solving skills and improve my communication skills.

Lessons learned

I won't leave this article without a quote or two, I really think quotes can change your perspective of life (not all obviously, but some)

"Do one thing every day that scares you" -- Eleanor Roosevelt

I started recording videos, recording the voice-over (yikes, I hated my voice for the initial few videos, I still hate it, but have gotten used to it). I don't just say, I do! Or I do and then say like this article 😎

One more, please?

"It's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." -- Abraham Lincoln

This is how I feel right now, I overcame one obstacle in my life, and the other is right here waiting for me to shoot down. You can't wait for life to ease out for you, you will have to find happiness in the hardships and highs and lows in your life.

Achievements

I feel good, but there is a mountain to climb. It is a marathon, not a sprint. I am excited about the year ahead, all the things I will learn, what responsibilities will be given, and will I make new connections in tech.

Technical Retrospective

I would like to view the year into the things I created namely the blogs and the video that I made.

Articles Written

This could have been better but still managed to write around 13 articles (excluding this), about Cody setup in Neovim, Nginx basics, Golang HTTP POST and PUT methods, Advent of Code approach and solutions in Golang.

Youtube Channel

On September 9th I published my first YouTube video, I always wanted to create some tutorial about the things I know or want to learn. On that day, I kept my doubts and fears aside and hit the record button. It went bad, but I published the video. It took me roughly 5 hours to record the voice-over for a 6-minute video, I was in shambles after that. I then decided to double down on creating YouTube videos, to remove my fear of communicating, speaking, and expressing ideas and emotions through YouTube. And after 4 months, I have published around 14 videos. Not only that, I started to do live streams on weekends as well. I did around 16 live streams on Twitch and YouTube, I feel a lot better and a lot more confident.

And yes the time required for me to create a video, record voice-over, and do the editing is significantly improving with each video, the last video I posted of 50 minutes, I recorded within an hour, one shot, and the next hour, the video was published. If I am the only person to benefit from my videos, then so be it.

Here is the summary of the videos I made from September to December:

I just have only 50 odd subscribers and a couple of thousand views, it is just the start, and I am not looking into the metrics right now, surely I am trying to improve and build a community, but numbers don't mean anything to me right now at least. I am creating videos that I would like to watch myself if I hadn't known about the concepts that I once didn't knew.

Open Source Contributions

I wanted to do many more open-source contributions, but since I worked on creating YouTube videos, I didn’t get much headspace to work on them. Next year I want to create some form a habit to read some code, that way I know I will bang my head to fix the issues or discover something new. Creating a chain of exploring, learning, and contributing.

Projects Created

I created a few projects, some of them just to explore the technologies and little MVPs, one project that I can be open to showing is the Outsmarty project. This project is like a Psyche Clone in Golang, it’s not a mobile application, it is a web app. I have not completed it as usual but it is a good concept that I created till most of the heavy lifting, I usually quit at the frontend interfaces.

Non-Technical Stuff

I was really into writing and reading in the second half of the year. I decided to create a morning routine for a couple of weeks, but Indian parents, had to put that routine into trash can, but it was a good experience while it lasted.

Hopefully, as I carry forward this momentum and energy, I will likely have one novella completed this year. I not just hoping to do that I am planning it now.

Goals for 2025

Moving into 2025, I want to write more code and of course articles and videos. Let’s get more specific of what I am thinking of:

Conclusion

It was a year to remember for sure. I said this last year as well but in a bad way. If there was a year to forget, it would have been late 2023 and the first half of 2024, but the second half of 2024 was a blessing for me. I overcame my fear of speaking to some extent, at least starting to address the issues.

If I were to sum up the year, I am definitely happier than I was last year, and a lot more excited than I was last year. Money can't buy happiness, if you don't find joy within, nothing can be happiness. I think curiosity, consistency, and grit are pillars of my life and I stick to it this year and want to continue to do so.

I will leave you with one more quote,

"Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain." -- Vivian Greene

I hope your year was good too, if not may 2025 be the year of your dreams, you absolutely got this.

See you on the other side 👋

Happy New Year 🎆

And as always,

Happy Coding :)