I started my full-time career in software development in Jan 2022. (Freelancing before that)
There were so many unknowns, and if I will be candid here, it was giving me goosebumps, not because I can't do it, but because there were a lot of things to wrap my head around.
Even though I built my basics strong (HTML, CSS, JS) that's not all, there are so many things in the front end other than building pixel-perfect User Interfaces and implementing functionalities.
Software development is a continuously changing field and you have to update your knowledge on daily basis to stay relevant.
So instead of learning everything in the beginning, I decided I learn things whenever I come across them and update my knowledge on a daily basis. I was ready to explore new things.
A little about my background:
I used to be a doctor 🩺👨⚕️ before becoming a coder, I was basically a self-taught coder and the interesting thing is that I was not learning to get a Job, I was learning because I was just following my passion. Completed Full stack BootCamp from Crio.
I will share my journey in some other article.
Something about my career choice-
Why I started my career with a service-based company?
I wanted to explore various tech stacks before settling on one or never settle 🫣.
There might be less possibility of getting this in a product-based company.
Second: I really love the UIs of various websites in the portfolio of squreboat.com website.
Design: (A little out of context)
Although I am not very deep into design but can pick one user-friendly and beautiful one when I see it.
Out of curiosity, I read some design books too 😁.
The design of everyday things is one of my favorite books.
(I guess every frontend developer should have a design sense to make the user experience better)
The beginning of 2022:
I got assigned to a client project.
Task- Convert static website -> dynamic website
Tech Stack -
Backend- Oracle CMS
Frontend- Nextjs, Tailwind
It was an excellent experience for me, although I was not creating anything from scratch but making a static site dynamic was also a great experience.
The Middle of 2022:
I got assigned multiple projects and I was basically juggling various tasks/features, day in and day out, attended various client calls in a day,
In this part, My habit of making my documentation helped me a lot.
There was a time when clients were sharing various tasks over email/Whatsapp and then forgetting what they said earlier.
Keeping good documentation (Google Sheets) helped in many things
First of all, keeping everything in one place.
Sending daily work reports 😁. (also helped if I forgot a work report, just copy and paste from the sheet 😂)
Time Estimation- just put time against a task.
Priority- Assign priory and work accordingly.
Reducing PM work- Sometimes PM used to just copy and paste from my sheet for various communication with the client.
New Project for a Design Website
I also got a chance to start a project from scratch,
This was basically an internal project for another sister entity of our Organization.
We were a team of 3 frontend developers who created really cool-looking website with a lot of animation (Animation is not done by me), but there is another level of satisfaction when u create something from scratch within a very tight schedule.
Current Project:
I got assigned to one single project
So basically I started enjoying working at a product in a service-based company.
Tasks:
New Feature Implementation
Landing page
Page speed optimization,
SEO-related work.
Web performance optimization
Structured Data Implementation
In this process, I am doing a lot of work for optimizing web performance and also fixing/updating SEO-related code. This is providing me a lot of opportunities to go deeper, learn and optimize website performance and also improve google ranking/indexing of the website.
What's New-
Mentoring:
Although, I have mentored a lot of people over the phone/online mode (at no charge), this time, I started mentoring a frontend Engineer (Level 0).
I was not avoiding a new responsibility but coding is my first love 💝, I love to code, debug, and give/take help to/from others. So I was postponing everything which is not related to code, and creating some distractions.
But this time, at my organization I got assigned a mentee, It was very difficult to get time from a busy project because context switching means less focus on work.
I have taken this as an opportunity, I'm still learning to manage it properly, and I guess this part also takes continuous effort. I have to wait before assessing the outcomes.
Backend:
Although, I've already built various backends using CMS,
(created and integrated Sanity CMS, Strapi CMS, and Oracle CMS already )
But I always wanted to learn the proper backend, and for that my organization and clients both agreed to provide some time to learn and implement.
Currently, learning/creating a backend using Nestjs, and created a backend for a contact form and integrated it with the frontend in my current project.
I guess I need to learn things incrementally, currently started reading some blogs about the backend and what
Some useful blogs:
How to Become a Good Backend Engineer (Fundamentals) - By Hussein Nasser
I ask this question to every Backend Engineer -By Hussein Nasser
AWS Services must for Front-end developers - By Neha Sharma
Things I wish I knew when I started learning cloud - By Neha Sharma
I am still trying to wrap my head around various things at the backend (language, DBMS, proxy, etc.), working so that I'll have a good grasp of the Backend at the end of 2023.
Meetup and events
Attended an offline web security meetup
Attended Devfest 2022 (GDG Delhi)
Appeared as a panel Reboots '23 Career Conclave by Crio.do.
Although the year 2022 is coming to an end, the roller coaster ride is still going on, and I am enjoying it.
Sabbatical:
I am ending this year by taking a spiritual vacation.
I've completed a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat near Rohtak. (link).
It is a 10-days silent retreat. No phones, no speaking, no contact with others. You’re not even allowed to write or use any healing modality. Just silent meditation.
The effects are abstract but I would say it is basically a service center for my mind and body.
What Else 🥘:
Speed is very important for a performant website, at the front end most of the speed is reduced by heavy-size images, I was also struggling with this problem.
The client's design team used to share beautiful images with a lot of MBs, which used to slow down the page load.
To fix this problem, I created a small image optimizer software, It does only one job and only one job very well, In just one command, it converts big-size images from MBs to KBs, without losing the quality of the images.
eg. >10Mb ------> <100kb
And the good thing is it provides images in an optimized Webp* format, so chrome is also happy and it won't complain.
\WebP* is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Currently, I'm using it locally.
Whenever I get time I will create some minimal UI and deploy it somewhere, I have plans to make it public and freely available to use🤞.
Summary:
I have learned
GTM/GTag/Google Adsense/Google Console implementation (configuration in console and code level implementation)
Structured data (advanced level SEO), not for UI but for google search, so that it will show nicely when someone searches.
Sitemap (necessary for big websites>500page, but can be implemented in small websites also )
The importance of no follow/follow, no index/index
Website performance
Accessibility
SEO
👷♂️ Built a small software for image optimization
👋 Meet a lot of people.
That's all about my experience in the year 2022, if you want to connect with me, please reach out at either Twitter or LinkedIn.