An Exciting Journey, Got My First Job And More, A 2021 Recap

This article was an old post that was originally posted in Indonesia, I just reupload it and then translated to English myself

Introspection, a self-awareness

Starting 2021 is tough and a lot of things have happened. First, before I jumped into the programming world, I was a person who likes to play MMORPG games, my daily activities are just playing games in front of my computer, sometimes I don't sleep but just playing games all day.

But then I realized myself with my family situation, yep.. I was born in a poor family, even though I entered in Software Engineering field when I was in High School, but then a pandemic was appeared and school activities has totally stopped, because of this, I started to find a new hobbies, like playing games.

In February, I decided to stop playing games, and started exploring Web Development related field, because as I said before, I choose Software Engineering when I was in High School, and I got plenty background from there when I was in 10th grade.

Become a Lost Sheep

Soon it would be end of February, I'm still following the tutorial without a direction, where I learned the basics of HTML at W3 Schools and without a mentor or even a roadmap, I was totally blind, I can't even create a Hidden Nav Menu LOL😂.

I didn't stop there, I continued to learn CSS, and this is where I fell in love with Frontend Web Development, because to be honest, I actually works well with design, but I can't use tools like Adobe Photoshop, but when I make some line of code using CSS, the website looks good and exactly same with what I want.

A New Sign Of Light

After about 2 Months of being a lost sheep, I also found a very cool YouTube channel, Web Programming UNPAS. On that YouTube channel I learned a lot, there is a playlist for Frontend Developers, so I started again from scratch, I also followed the Frontend Developer roadmap based on roadmap.sh, starting with HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Strengthening My Background, Taking Courses

Internet is a secondary home for me, there is a lot of information available by just accessing my smartphone, not only that, I only got helpful information that allow me to take a paid course, but with free access lifetime, isn't it awesome?.

I'm a person who likes to surf on social media, not only for entrertainment purpose, but I search for useful information, sharing with others, I can meet good people everyday and it's something else.

Dicoding Academy

Dicoding is a leading technology education platform that encourages wider access to digital literacy for everyone. Dicoding has a mission to accelerate Indonesia's transition to a digital world through technology education that transforms lives.

I am very happy that I can get access to paid courses for free at Dicoding academy, there are lots of classes, when I got the scholarship, I took Frontend roamdap, including:

Progate Academy

Progate is an easy-to-use platform designed to help learn coding online, and at Progate I learned a lot, not only Web Development, but I also learned other things like Python and Git.

React and NEXT.js

import React from 'react'
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'

function App() {
  return <h1>Hello World!</h1>
}

ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'))

In mid-June, I started to encourage myself to learn React, as you may know, JSX are very complicated, especially for a beginner.

At first I was really confused, I'm actually wanted to quit to learn React, but because of my hard work and watching lots of videos on YouTube, I finally knew how to write JSX and make a Web with React.

export default function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
  return <Component {...pageProps} />
}

Then in August, I tried to learn next.js, a framework built on top of React, it has many features such as built-in routing, and file-based routing.

Now I'm more comfortable with next.js, and then on October, I learned TypeScript, and I feel so comfortable with NEXT.js + TypeSCript.

Hacktoberfest And GetHired DevCode

On October, I participated in an event held by Developer around the world. it was Hacktoberfest, and I never heard about this before, and this is actually my first time to be a participant in Hacktoberfest.

The lesson that I got while participating in Hacktoberfest is that I can understand the concept of collaboration between developers by using Git.

Then I took part in the Frontend Challenge event held by Skyshi and Gethired Devcode.

A very exciting event, and there was so many people participated in this event, we were required to create a SPA-Based Web Application that focuses on performance.

When I participated in this event, I only won the 13th place out of more than 30 people participated, and I'm proud of myself because I was able to get the result because of me.

From this event, I learned something useful, like how to create an optimize app, managing state, and lazy loading a component.

Dreams Come True

At the end of 2021, I received a good news, I was invited to take part in an interview from Skyshi🤯, who's previously held the GetHired DevCode Event.

Then 2 days after the interview, I got welcomed as Jr. Frontend Developer at Skyshi.

Becoming a Frontend Developer is a dream of mine since I was in High School, this certainly makes me happy, work as same as my passion is something I look forward to.