As Dev Retro 2022 has arrived at Hashnode, developers all around the globe are taking a moment to reflect on their journey that has gotten them to where they are today, and I can't just stand by and watch...

I've been coding for almost three years now, and I think it's safe to say, that I've come a long way during these years. Through this post, I'll try to take you through the bumpy, annoying, yet incredibly rewarding journey I took to get here...

The very beginning

As soon as the world got into lockdown during Covid, I was placed at my home office, working as a network engineer for the Norwegian Police ICT. That was my career at the moment. I was a Cisco expert, working with routing, switching and firewalls all day. That's when it struck me - I have to learn something new.

Most of my friends and coworkers used the time during lockdown to sit around and not do anything. We could neither meet up for volleyball, have a drink nor go to a concert. Why even bother living?
Well, for me, this was the start of a brand new career and many months to come with ups and downs.

19th January 2020, I found myself googling for career advice when an old mate of mine suddenly called. It turns out he was running his own company as a fullstack-dev in Oslo. I don't think he understood it then, but this was the very reason I shifted google-tactics to "learn development online".

Then suddenly, I found myself at youtube, following along on the very course that was gonna change my life;

"Learn HTML5 and CSS3 From Scratch - Full course". 11 hours long... Well, I watched the whole thing more than less in two days. I've never had more fun during a online course in my whole life. This course learned me the basics of HTML and CSS, wich I'm still working on perfecting.

Never stop learning...

By fall 2022 I had another sitdown with my previously mentioned mate. He told me to look more into Javascript and eventually learn React.JS.
Well, your words, my command...

Another 12 hours of FreeCodeCamp.org on youtube later, I was at least triggered to learn more about all of this.

But then, how to learn all this? Of course, I could watch demo-videos and tutorials all day and copycat their code all I wanted, but no matter how many projects I made through tutorials, I never felt like I learned anything new, other than typing really fast.

My first big project - of course my own portfolio

After riding along in tutorial-hell for almost 6 months I finally realized that I had to figure out some sort of project on my own, and fail myself through it. That's when I figured out that I need a portfolio, and why not create that portfolio with React.js for the fun?

My online portfolio came to life during November 2022. It's one of the more simple react-apps I've ever created, but then again, this took me almost 100 hours just by failing myself through libraries and functions not working. Many times through the project I was inches from giving up and just wanted to quit, but I figured out that if I really wanted to have this as a living, I should really be able to build a simple portfolio web-app. And today I'm glad I did. This is still a living project that gets updated once in a while, and I'm really looking forward to looking back at how far I've come with this project in 4-5 years or so.

The present-day...

Lately, to improve my ability as a developer and the quality of the work I produce I have been re-studying JavaScript to nail down the bits of my knowledge that may not be so strong. This means I can go into learning more about building websites with Node.js with confidence in my JS skills to understand the principles fully.

I have also been working on building more open-source projects as well as practising my use of React.js and Next.js. I'm currently also trying to focus on growing my blog and creating high-quality valuable content.

Moving on into the new year

As I stated at the beginning, the year 2022 is coming to an end, and 2023 is coming up close. Hopefully, 2023 will be the year when I finalize most of my online portfolio, but also my other plans for the year gets me even more excited.

Say hello to Jotun Utvikling

As of 2023, I'm no longer just an independent contractor, but I started my own AS (Norwegian version of LTD).
The name is Jotun Utvikling (Troll Development), mostly because I live in the mountains and find the old sayings about the "Jotuns" that used to live in these mountains fascinating.
This project kind of states a milestone for me as a developer. For a long time I was sure that I had to live in one of Norway's bigger cities to work as a developer, but lately, as I live far, far out on the countryside, I've realized that having my own company and then sell my service to other companies works just fine from "anywhere".

My Goals for the future?

In the new year, I have a few goals I hope to achieve!

Of course, first of all, I'm aiming to fulfill my dream about my company and land a couple of great assignments from clients.
Besides that I also aim to look into advanced React to become well-seasoned in the popular JavaScript library, enabling me for any front-end job that may come up.

return completeYear(2022)

With that, 2022 is coming to a close. It's been a highly productive year and I have made a lot of progress in upgrading my skills as a developer as well as learning new things.