It's been 10 days since the start of 2025, and I'd also like "take inspiration" from Spotify Wrapped to give a wrap of what 2024 was like for me as a developer.
I started the year pretty early on by setting some goals that I wanted to accomplish. Spoiler: I didn't accomplish every goal, but that's not a bad thing and I'll explain why in this post.
In my post How I'm Improving My Dev Skills, I wrote that one of my goals of 2024 was to level up to a Senior Developer by getting better at technical communication. I was going to accomplish this by:
- Writing these blog posts
- Consuming web development content
- Helping others learn/solve problems
Writing Blog Posts
In 2024, I wanted to write a blog post for each month, starting in March (that's when I set the goal 😂). I didn't end up writing a post for each month, but I did write one for April - August. I had ideas for other posts I could write but never wrote full posts for those ideas. I have a few drafts that are longer than I intended and might be released this year. To some, I failed this goal, but to me, it was a success.
There isn't a blog post I wrote in 2024 that I can think of where I didn't learn something, either through playing around with code or researching a topic. This contributed to the increase in my technical communication. It has helped me feel more confident talking to coworkers and stakeholders about the technical aspects of the projects I'm working on.
Consuming Web Dev Content
I'm not sure there is a good way for me to put a number or value to how much content I consumed, but I can review some of the habits I have. I open both X (Twitter) and YouTube on almost a daily basis. If you can get past the poo pit that X is, there is some decent content, mainly just announcements from companies/contributors about their library or npm package.
As far as YouTube goes, I use it primarily for entertainment, but it isn't absent of coding-related videos. For example, if I open my YouTube feed right now, I see a Primeagen livestream, a 7 step video to becoming a .NET developer, a podcast episode from Syntax hosted by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski, a video from Theo about another browser, a video about data validation with Zod and React, and a video on Radix UI. I'd be interested to watch any one of those videos. Needless to say, there is plenty to watch 😂.
Helping Others Learn
I gained 1,260 reputation on Stack Overflow in 2024. Not a ton, but still a decent amount. For each question I answered, I included a StackBlitz repository that anyone else could open up and see the code for. I feel like this is where I learned a lot. While writing the code for an answer, I would think about writing it so that others could understand what was going on in my head. This really helped me to put words to my own understanding (something I struggle with on the daily).
Conclusion
So, to sum it up, during 2024, I wrote 5 blog posts, gained 1,260 reputation on Stack Overflow, and found new love for my YouTube feed that's saturated in coding content.
Thanks for reading, here's a cookie 🍪.