2018 has been an amazing year for me. I learnt new things, built a few things, wrote a handful of blog posts and met some amazing devs in the community. But above all, I became a better dev by learning and reflecting on my mistakes throughout. Here's a quick list down of how 2018 turned out to be an amazing year for me.

Things I built in 2018

• Browser or Node - January
• Typy - February
• Dev Landing Page - March
• Axios Retry Interceptor - March
• React-Redux Boilerplate - March
• React Render-In-Browser - May
• React Socks - November
• Typy v3 - December
• React Socks Stable - December

Things I wrote in 2018

• How I got started with Open-Source - February
• Accessing Nested Objects in JavaScript - February
• Short Circuit Assignment in JavaScript - February
• Publish your own NPM package - March
• Create your developer landing page with GitHub Pages - March
• React-Redux Boilerplate with Best Practices - March
• Upgrade to Webpack 4 - March
• I Created My Portfolio with React and Some Magic - April
• Render Browser Specific Content with React - May
• Introducing Responsive React Components - November

Goal Stats

• ✅ Start with OSS (have over 10 actively maintained projects now)
• ✅ Become an active contributor to a repo that’s not mine (became one of the top contributors)
• ✅ Create and publish a library that others find helpful (have 7 libs now with 130k+ downloads)
• ✅ Build a portfolio
• ✅ Hit 1k reps in Stack Overflow (2.4k currently)
• ✅ Hit 1k followers in dev.to (2.2k currently)
• ✅ Learn Docker, ELK stack, reverse proxy
• ⚠️ Hit 700 followers in twitter (695 now)
• ❌ Build a website that others find helpful
• ❌ Learn GraphQL, serverless, web components

Summary

• Started with OSS
• Quit my awesome job to take on a challenging role
• Moved to new country
• Started contributing more in Stack Overflow
• Started building and publishing libraries
• Started writing about the things I learn and the things I build
• Became a publisher in Hackernoon and Codeburst
• All my write ups together have been viewed over 250k times (100k+ DEV and 150k+ Medium)
• A few blog posts that I wrote got featured in other platforms and curations
• Found awesome people in the community (twitter and dev.to) and drew inspiration from them

Dev principles I picked up in 2018

I want to wrap up this post by highlighting a few dev principles I learnt and strictly adopted in my workflow in 2018.

• Code without tests is as good as no code at all
• No Abstraction > Wrong Abstraction
• Most optimization strategies you come up with will either result in premature-optimization or over-optimization. Optimize only when absolutely necessary.
• Have a broader vision of the problem/solution but break it down and build in small portions incrementally
• If you add a todo to improve later, you’ll never get back to it. So, do it now.

🥂 To another wonderful year full of opportunities and amazing people 🥂