🌟 #DEVImpact2023 - My Proudest Moments, Failures and Wins

#devimpact2023 #career

Proudest Moment - Becoming a GDE

I became a Goggle Developer Expert 😇!

I never thought about applying because I thought that with my small online presence, I don't have enough influence and other GDEs regularly publish videos or give talks, which I don't do.

I thought I'd give it a go anyway, I have nothing to lose. It was exciting to go through all those application steps and interviews. I had the honour of convincing Sam Dutton, a Googler, why I was a good fit for GDE, and I nailed it.

Receiving the news in November that I am now officially a GDE was definitely the highlight of 2023.

DEV Contributions

At the beginning of the year, I continued to regularly write about 2 blog posts per week to fulfill the challenge of writing 2 articles per week for 1 year. A challenge that unfortunately only existed in my head and never on DEVto as a badge criteria 🤣.

After that, things went a bit quiet for me. There was too much going on for me to concentrate on my side projects and such. I started learning Austrian Sign Language 🧏🏽‍♀️, took 3 courses at university, it was just too much.

That changed when the Hacktoberfest was just around the corner and I made a strong comeback. I got active again, prepared for Maintaining and Contribution in Preptemeber (that's what it's for 👀) and started writing regularly again.

Brilliant Fails

Did I fail this year? Hell yes, I have 😈. And that's okay.

I used this year to see where my limits were and I reached them. Failing at 3 tasks I had set out to achieve showed me where my strengths lie, how much my brain can handle and how well I planned my time and content.

With all this newfound knowledge, I will be able to make 2024 even more successful 🤓.

Celebrate the Numbers

20 posts published
354 total reactions
January was busiest month
78 people discussed tech with me
18 hours were spend reading my articles
#career and #webdev were most used/favorite tags
HTML can do this was most loved article
21 devs mentioned me

Thanks @code42cate for creating this awesome tool. 😄 Is there a chance to generate it for the previous years as well? Would be nice.

Shoutouts

I would like to thank these wonderful people with whom I have had a special connection in one way or another throughout the year (randomly ordered) 💪🏼:

Check out their GitHub profiles, blog post, and more, these people are amazing!

Future Goals

My main goal for the future is to make my project Accessibility First more visible.

I also have other goals in mind for my career in the field of accessibility, and I'm currently trying to plan them out.

What Does DEV Means to You?

DEV has made it possible for me to become a blog post author. Since I started writing, I've had nothing but good experiences with the platform and the community that no other platform could offer me.

And it seems that not only does DEV mean a lot to me, but DEV means a lot to me.