2021, Year in review

Compared to 2020, 2021 was pretty happening for me. I was really busy at work pretty much the entire year. It’s not like I only worked, I also learned a lot. I know that we’re already 15 days into 2022 and it’s really late for review kind of thing but here we are.

After spending almost an year at home in 2020, we were finally able to return back to college in January. We were really happy going back to college after a long time and did all kind of fun things. It was our last year, so we moved to a new hostel building and enjoyed our remaining days in the campus. I had to manage both work and partying with friends. It was a bit hard but I enjoyed a lot. I also strted building the next iteration of BillBird with Soumya. But our enjoyment didn’t last long as some students of our year ended up having a fight with juniors and we had to vacate the campus. I made a lot of memories and will definitely cherish them forever. Covid cases started to rise and I was back home again. Same boring life.

Around the start of May, I graduated and joined Hunter, another client at Evidev. I joined as a Frontend Developer and oh boy my dream of working in an engineering team of seasoned senior engineers was finally fulfilled. The product was really interesting and so did the tech stack. I learned a lot of advanced concepts in Vue from my seniors. I was coming from working in a two person team, so the experience was really overwhelming for me. Around that time I started building pdf-donkey, a platform to generate PDFs on the fly with template variable and much more easily. The tech stack was React, Vite, Experss, PostgresQL and it was my first proper React fullstack project. I finally learned the basics of React, how hooks work, and more after building it. Manish helped me setting up the docs for pdf-donkey and it was also a great learning experience for him.

Shortly after that, I started building Furikaeru, another product which was meant for discussing retrospective at Hunter. After building it for a while, I made it a bit flexible and added support for private boards, voting, privacy mode and much more. Then I got bored and stopped the development. It was built on Vue 3, Vite, Express and PostgresQL, again I learned a lot from this too. Around the end of July, I started building the second iteration of June, a project by Manish. I had some different ideas and so I picked up the development. It was a React-Vite app, with Express-MongoDB as BE. This is for the first time I touched MongoDB, the experience was not great for me who is coming from a relational DB background. Still I kept building it with Manish till September. Evident, my first project at Evidev got funded and due to work load, I left Hunter in September to work full-time on Evident.

After coming back, We expanded the Team and started building the product in a more systematic way. We are joined by a seasoned product manager and designer who had a lot more experience in the field. We had the chance to upgrade the tech stack and we did it too. Personally the last few months of 2021 were not that busy for me. I had a lot of responsibilities at work and tried my best to keep up with it. Even though I was learning a lot, I ended up getting tired after work and was unable to focus on something. I let it be that way for the last few months as I needed a break from continuous learning and building throughout the year.

About difficulties, I didn’t face any serious challenges apart from technical stuff at work and personal projects. Apart from some personal issues, fortunately It was a smooth year. My greatest achievement for the year would be learning many things and also helping the team at Evident ship the product in just 3 months. I feel really proud of the team and myself too. I found out that, challenges made me more efficient at learning things and I hope to face more challenges. Ah, I forgot, We also made BillBird open-source after building it for more that a year. I felt it was time to let it go, as I never had time to maintain it properly.

For 2022, It was not a good start as I got Covid in the first week, LOL. Let’s see what happens next. I’m hoping to learn more in the React/Svelte ecosystem and Backend Dev. I’m also working on a really cool product which is not open-source yet. Anyways, thanks for reading and happy new year, Peace ☮️