It has been a year on Dev Community and i'm not happpy about it. yes, i'm not happy about it because the kind of things i've imagined i'd be doing by the time i completed a year on dev and all... is much, much, MUCH more than what i'm doing today.

it's not that i made no progress in this past year. i've made a decent amount of progress, and i know that.

it's just that the bar in my head is so much higher than what i actually end up doing.

and sometimes, that's a very frustrating place to be in.

Why I joined Dev...

i've been reading articles and blogs for years, and somehow, one day, i came across an article on dev community.

i don't remember the exact article or the writer, but i remember loving the way it was articulated, it felt so humanly in this ai-ish content era that i really liked it !!
that's what made me start enjoying dev community's articles in the first place.

What I thought this year would look like...

I genuinely thought that by the time i completed a year on dev, i'd be a recognised developer here.

Someone whose work people knew, whose articles people looked forward to reading, and who had built a little corner of the internet of her own.

but well, it wasn't an easy year.

I built some projects i'm genuinely proud of, participated in online hackathons, and contributed to open source.
everything got a little cluttered and that's why i wasn't able to build my presence on dev the way i'd imagined i would.

and that's something i've been thinking about lately.

because sometimes you can be making progress in so many different directions and still feel like you're falling short of the one thing you really wanted.

I'm proud of what i've done this year. I just know there's so much more i wanted to do.

and maybe that's okay, as long as i don't keep making the same mistake of trying to do everything without giving enough attention to the things that matter to me.

Learning from the OGs ..

One of my favourite things about being here has been coming across people whose work, thoughts, and experiences teach me something new.

I might not always say it, but I really admire your writing on dev community @sylwia-lask, @nyaomaru, @xulingfeng, @akhourianmolkumar, @javz, @hemapriya_kanagala, @maame-codes
and so many more people I've haven't known yet..

not where i thought i'd be, but definitely not where i started.
let's see what year 2 looks like, cheers 🍻