The main character

Sheeeeeesh what a year it has been! I probably wouldn't be wrong if I called it the most crucial year of my life (so far 😆). 2022 literally made me decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. A mere student, unsure about what to do and where to go for guidance found all his answers and also received the much-required support of his parents. I hope you enjoy this recap as much as I enjoyed the whole journey. The events that took place this year mean a lot to me so forgive me if I come off as a little too emotional lol. Here are the highlights of the first season of Samarth: Blades of Vengeance (many thanks to GPT-3 for this badass title).

A ray of hope

In January, I was still a fresher in college. I was good at Python and my friend and I pretty much helped the class get good grades that semester. But I did not have much idea about what I wanted to pursue as a career. I only knew that I had to build my skills, get involved in Open Source (thanks, Kunal Kushwaha) and get opportunities off campus. Which skills should I build? Which languages should I learn? How exactly do I do Open Source work? How do I get opportunities? What do I do? No clue at all. Zero. But coincidentally, at that time, clubs and chapters in my college were recruiting freshers across the design, management and technical domains. I applied to a lot of clubs but kept on getting rejected. That is when reality hit: though I knew a lot of things, I was merely average in them. I realized that I needed to pick a niche and start grinding. There was only one club that accepted me in the technical domain with a specialization in one particular field. I only got qualified because I knew some stuff about the said field and was truly interested in this technology. And so this field was my cloud's silver lining: Blockchain

Found MY people

I was confused about where to properly start learning blockchain development. Digressed here and there but thankfully found a great community called LearnWeb3DAO (LW3). They had a clear roadmap-based learning path and as a beginner, that really appealed to me. I went to their website and joined their Discord server. I made connections in their community and a lot of those connections eventually turned into friendships (the photo above was taken at ETHIndia 2022). Not trying to shill LW3 here but the community is really friendly and no one hesitated one bit to resolve my doubts. It was all smooth sailing....or so I thought.

Made a rookie mistake

I'm 100% sure you'll be able to relate to this section. I jumped into the advanced stuff without getting good practice with the basics. As someone who hadn't worked with the web-dev stack in the past 5 years, I should have built some projects to refresh my memory. Also, I kept following tutorials about building websites+smart contracts from scratch without learning React properly. Needless to say, that was a counter-intuitive step and it slowed down my learning. My mentor/friend, Abbas Khan, who also happens to be the most disciplined and hard-working person I know, told me to take a step back and build some projects. So that's what I did. More precisely, tried to do

Time to build some... Nevermind 😞

And just when you get a great idea in mind and prepare to build some dope sh*t, college academics. Of course. I should have known. I ended up half-baking more than a quarter of the projects that I made this year, including my submission for ETHIndia, a 36-hour hackathon to which I was late by 24 hours thanks to end-sem exams (and then a severe headache had me crash for 5 hours). However, blaming it all on college would be rather incorrect and would only mean that I am running from the truth. I could have done a lot more had I not used college academics as an excuse, managed my time properly and not diverted from my main goal. I will take care of these issues from now onwards.

Here I stand...

...a step above where I was at the end of 2021, and this step is a huge one by the way. I can work with HTML, CSS, JS, TS, React, Vite, Nextjs, TailwindCSS, Figma and to some extent, Solidity. One of my top four projects this year is a chrome extension that restores the old YouTube player on YT Shorts videos. Another one of those is an app that gives you Movie/Book/Game/Song/Food recommendations using OpenAI's API (thanks, buildspace). Here is the link to my GitHub profile. Currently, I am a web3 frontend developer because I have the typical web2 frontend stack and I know how to integrate smart contracts with frontends. The best, however, is yet to come.

Season 2 precap/expectations

I have got many many plans for the coming year. I have already started learning backend development using Nodejs and Express and will continue to expand my stack and build some dope stuff. I will look for an internship this year and also try to win some hackathons. Don't be too surprised if at the end of 2022 you see me as a full-stack blockchain developer doing some amazing work and revolutionizing (or helping revolutionize) the way the web works today.

Thank you(s)

There are so many people that I am grateful to. Here I'll just mention the ones off the top of my head. The entire LearnWeb3DAO team (specially Haardik), Abbas Khan, Vanshika Rana, Dhruv Agarwal, Shikhar Pratap Verma, Vatsal Awadhiya, Kunal Kushwaha, Kushagra Sarathe, Yogesh Jadhav, Aditya Gupta, Eda, Larry Cutts, Alec Wantoch, Rahul Singh, and my family. You all added some value to my life this year. And a special thanks to you, the reader. I hope you find my blogs interesting/helpful. I will improve the quality of my blogs in 2023. See you in the next one 👋👋