This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
Photo by Stockcake
Table of Contents
- Whoa
- Smooth sailing
- Sinking into a sea of confusion
- A Silver Lighting in Bleak Skies
- Shoutouts
- Footnotes
Whoa
If I were asked to use a metaphor to describe my tech journey in 2024, it would be like Odysseus sinking in the deep ocean due to exhaustion from constantly battling sea monsters. Now before I start rambling, join me in reminiscing about the wins, losses, and musings about 2025.
Smooth sailing
There were so many wins that I experienced in 2024, but I had to pick a few, it would be the following:
Accomplishment #1: Becoming a writer for Pieces
My colleague @sophyia messaged me on X(Twitter) saying that she read some of my articles on freeCodeCamp, mentioned @get_pieces1, and thought I’d be a good fit for their content writing program. By working closely with the head of content, I gained deep knowledge about developing articles that are strategically optimized for search engines. Here are my favorite articles:
Accomplishment #2: Participating in RSOD
Over the summer I participated in Rocky Summer of Docs(RSOD)2. It’s where people win $200 for writing three-five tutorials for the GNOME Desktop section of the Rocky Linux’s documentation site. Here are few tutorials I have written:
Through this experience, I not only learned the power of Linux but also how to work with a virtual machine, something that can greatly serve me in the future.At this point, things were sailing smoothly. Little did I know that a big storm was about to hit.
Sinking into a sea of confusion
It was July, and I was just finishing writing my weekly tweet buildspace’s nights and weekends challenge. Then out of nowhere, I started feeling very sleepy. Me being the fighter, I thought I just need a little break from blogging, open source, job searching, and tweeting to be my energetic self. Well that little break turned into a long vacation for the rest of 2024. During that rest, I found myself feeling unmotivated to post or do anything related to open source and blogging. I even came to the sad realization that my dream to being a full time technical writer is not possible for me at this moment. 😢
A Silver Lighting in Bleak Skies
Since having my sad realization, I’ve been doing some soul searching an idea came to my head. I remember a close relative suggesting to pursue a career in IT and brushing it off because I didn’t think it would help me with becoming a technical writer. I decided to give it another shot this time around. So after doing some research on IT HelpDesk position, I jumped for joy! 🥹 This role has the skills that I can transfer in a full time technical writing position. I know there will be more tough seas ahead in making this shift but with persistence and faith, I’m determined to continue sailing! ⛵️ 😊
Shoutouts
Topic Sentence: As I always like to say, “There’s no u in group”. Here are some people I would like to thank for their help:
- Thank you @elliezub for being a great colleague, fellow technical writer, and creating awesome work about Pieces
- Thank you @anmolbaranwal for inspiring to a bit more adventurous with my blogging! 😊
- Merci beaucoup @thomasbnt for being an awesome coding buddy! 😊
If you want to stay updated on my journey, follow me on Dev.to and check out my other social links below 👇:
📝 Check out my other content on Hashnode
🫱🏾🫲🏻 Connect with me on Linkedin
Footnotes
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Pieces is an awesome AI tool that improves your development workflow. It’s like having a coding AI best friend. 😊 If you want to learn more about it, check out my review ↩
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Rocky Linux started this initiative after being inspired by Google Summer of Docs. Check out their websiteto learn more. ↩
That a awesome year! Congrats!