Dev Retro 2022: My Year in Review as a Developer & Content Creator

A year of learning and giving back to the community.

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Dev Retro 2022: My Year in Review as a Developer & Content Creator

Hello Developers ๐Ÿ‘‹,

I would like to thank team hashnode for giving me an opportunity to reflect back on my journey as a developer and content creator in 2022 via #DevRetro2022.

Who am I?

  • I am Shubham Lashkan from India.

  • I am currently working as a Salesforce Developer at Advanz101 for the last 1 and a half years.

  • My Journey as a developer in 2022 is exciting as I got to learn a lot of new things.

What did I learn?

I got to learn about webhooks because of one requirement of fetching leads in real-time from one platform to Salesforce at work. It was a great learning experience as I was involved in exploring everything about the APIs and designing the architecture of the system. While working on the project I got to learn about MetaDataAPI in salesforce which helps us work with salesforce metadata. Also got the opportunity to present the project to the team which helped me enhance my communication skills and I also bagged a great appraisal.

During the development of the application, I was also preparing for Platform Developer 1 Certification and was able to pass the exam.

Also after the successful development of the application one day I was asked to learn Salesforce CPQ because of requirements in other projects. Learning CPQ was quite overwhelming for me because it involves a lot of admin tasks and there is a lot to remember. But somehow I started learning it so that I can learn the basics and work on the task assigned to me.

While learning CPQ I was involved in the development of 5 applications but still, there is a lot to learn. As they say, keep learning keep growing.

Also during the development of CPQ applications, I was preparing for Platform App Builder Certification and was able to pass it successfully.

I have already started learning LWC which is the Salesforce framework for frontend development so looking forward to mastering it in 2023.

Journey as a Content Creator

I was already sharing video content on my youtube channel which you can find here and continued with video content creation but was not consistent with it and somehow managed to cross 200+ subscribers.

Also, I took a challenge to grow my audience on Twitter which helped me master consistency. So for achieving consistency during the second half of the year I thought of integrating Twitter with Salesforce because not everyone can buy a subscription to schedule content. So I integrated and schedule some recurrent posts along with auto retweet and undo features. Also revised Python to share content related to it. Finally, I have 550+ followers on the application which is huge as compared to 50-odd followers at the start of the year.

In the last quarter, I decided to share content on LinkedIn and grow my audience there too so I just started repurposing my python content which helped me save time.

So consistency and willingness helped me grow my audience and also I launched an ebook on gumroad which you can get from here.

Twitter API taught me Patience

The idea of integrating Twitter with Salesforce seems easy for a developer who has worked with other APIs and I have also thought the same. My idea was to sign up for Twitter APIs and complete the integration within a day or 2 but understanding Twitter documentation is a huge pain and all the developers who have consumed the APIs from scratch will agree with me. At one point in time, I also thought of giving up the idea of integration because it was not paying me anything, to be honest.

After giving up on integration one day I was getting bored on weekends I thought of studying something and remembered that I was not able to understand the docs so I gave one more try to understand its documentation and after wasting or you can say investing my time I was able to crack the code.

You can see some test tweets below.

Here are some replies from friends on Twitter.

Link to all the test tweets which I tried from salesforce.

The biggest learning while dealing with it is you can solve any problem with Patience, Willingness along with never give up attitude.

The Wins

  • Fetched 171 subscribers in a year and hasn't published a video in 2nd half.

  • Here are the Salesforce Certifications I cleared.

  • Twitter analytics comparison December 2021 vs December 2022

I will get back to video content creation so if you want me to create a video on the topic of your choice then let me know in the comment section. I will try to do my best.

How and When I Started Blogging?

I was thinking of starting blogging a few months back and was confused about which platform to choose or if should I code the backend from scratch to store blog data. After some rounds of discussion with friends on Twitter who are actively blogging, I decided to go with hashnode and you will be surprised to know that #DevRetro2022 will be the first article. So looking forward to getting support from the community and keep learning along with sharing.

Plans for 2023

  • I will continue sharing content on LinkedIn & Twitter. Also, get back to video content creation along with blogging.

  • I will also continue learning LWC hence you can expect some content on that too.

  • Get better at JavaScript because everyone knows that you can't master it easily.

  • Earn some more Salesforce Certification.

  • Earn some dollars online because every content creator wants it.

Conclusion

2022 turned around to be one of the best years as a developer I got to learn new things and give back to the community by sharing my learning in public.

By the way, how was your year in review?

Let me know in the comments.

My Message to New Developers

  • Learning coding at first seems frustrating because you might not understand why certain things are not working the way you thought but if you keep practicing and don't give up then everything will fall into place.

  • Get the basics right because syntax might change but the basics will always remain the same.

  • Don't focus on multiple programming languages/frameworks at the same time.

  • Get a mentor because it will help you what not to do from their experience.

  • At last willingness, dedication and patience are the keys to becoming a successful developer.

  • Good luck on your learning journey and looking forward to reading about your journey next year via #DevRetro2023.

I was looking to get into technical writing so if you want me to write an article then please connect with me on my Twitter here.

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