2021 In Review
As 2022 is around the corner, I wanted to review what happened in my life this year and what I want to achieve in 2022.
At the start of this year, I thought COVID would die down in a couple of months. But little did I know there would be a second wave, which would cause more damage. Now, there are variants of the virus that are spreading more rapidly, and there could be a third wave in India. I guess this is the new normal, and we have to live with it for the foreseeable future.
Career
One of the major highlights this year would be, I got promoted to Senior Frontend Developer. I was already doing loads of things that a senior developer should be doing, but conducting technical interviews was something new I had to do. Initially, I was uncertain about taking interviews. But after shadowing a couple of interviews, I gained confidence and currently taking plenty of interviews.
On a side note, if anyone is looking for software developer positions, feel free to ping me.
Working at Pepper Content for the last 1.5 years has been great. Getting good opportunities, having a great team, and the company growing at a terrific pace.
We started Pepper Content 4 years back in our second year of college and never thought that we will build a large business from doing what we loved. When you look back today, you realise the impact of the work you have been able to drive through. Here is some of the impact pic.twitter.com/JvqVTL5DjD
— Anirudh Singla (@SinglaAnirudh) December 29, 2021
The key benefit of working at a startup is that you get to do plenty of significant work in a short amount of time. Here are some of the prominent things that I worked on
- Launching v2 of Peppercontent's Platforms (Worked on it for the last 4-5month of 2020). It has also evolved a lot since then.
- New design language for most of the Marketing pages
- Headless WordPress setup for blogs with Next.js
- Working on Peppertype
- Mentoring one developer
- Conducted over 60+ interviews
- Worked on v1 of Peppertype chrome extension
We also won the first hackathon at Pepper Content.
And winning it ๐ https://t.co/8zAF3v4eKr
— Jibin Thomas (@real_jibin) December 9, 2021
Things I learned
- Creating Browser extension publishing it to chrome store
- Learned to use these AWS Services - (Amplify, Cognito, Elastic Beanstalk, Codebuild, Codepipeline) in some capacity. Still, I find AWS to be very complex.
- Some backend API features written in Node.js (Express.js) made it's way to production
- Learned to invest in the stock market
- Started learning about blockchain, cryptos, d-apps.
Other
Writing Blog Posts
After some of the drafts posts got deleted earlier this year (I didn't back up the files before formatting my PC), I didn't have the motivation to write since then. This year I want to pick up writing posts once again.
Playing games
Gaming has been my rescue when I needed to chill out and relax. Playing multiplayer games with friends has been my favorite pastime this year. I spent over 500hrs+ playing CSGO & Valorant this year (Still, I'm bad at it ๐).
Reading books
Reading one book per month was successful, and I want to continue doing the same for 2022. These two books are my favorite reads this year
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
Things to achieve in 2022
- ๐ Learning a new programming language (maybe Rust or Go lang)
- ๐งโ๐จ Learning Blender
- ๐๏ธ Learning to drive (last year's task)
- ๐ช Staying fit
Here's to a great 2022! ๐พ