Hi, I’m Dan, currently a Software Engineer at SleekFlow building social e-commerce applications. Before becoming an Engineer, I was a Ceramics teacher and Writer.
Jan 2023 conveniently marks 2 years since I started programming and ~1.5 years since my first job. Within this time I’ve worked at two companies and learnt a lot about being a Software Engineer.
With 2022 firmly in the books, I’d like to share what’s happened, some thoughts and what’s coming in 2023.
First, lets start with some highlights…
- 1397 contributions across 5 repositories
- wrote 2 blog articles
- interviewed many candidates for frontend positions
- learned from many talented engineers
- given over 200 code reviews and received a lot as well
- designing workflows and systems to make collaboration easier
2022 has been about devouring as much knowledge as I can, getting my hands dirty with code and learning how to talk and think like an Engineer. It was the first time I started giving out a code reviews as well as receiving them.
To build fast, help others
This year, 24% of my time was spent on code reviews (stat courtesy of GitHub). As the company I am working at rapidly expanded this past year from 20 people to over 100, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt is that great software (usually) can’t be built in isolation. When I first started programming, most online courses advertised themselves along the lines of ‘once you learn programming, you can build anything.’
While this is kind of true, to build something at scale you will usually require a team. There is only so much time and code you can write by yourself. If you want to build something fast, well and without long hours and mental burnout, hire good people and spend time making sure they are motivated, comfortable and know what they are doing.
Some technologies I’ve worked with this year:
- NextJS
- React
- CSS/component libs (ChakraUI, Tailwind CSS, Material UI, Mantine UI)
- Tanstack Query
- Tanstack Table
- React Router
- Typescript
- Rust
I quite enjoyed the technology stack I’ve worked with this year, no real complaints. I think I will drop Chakra UI from my stack just because I don’t really use it at my workplace and I can easily replace it with some of the others in my personal projects. I might add a few testing libraries I’ve been meaning to explore for 2023 as well as some other frontend frameworks.
Online resources and people that have impacted me the most:
- Matt Pocock & Total Typescript
- Jack Herrington
- Kent C. Dodds
- The Complete 2023 Web Development Bootcamp — Dr. Angela Yu
- Theo — t3.gg
- Dominik
- Tanner Linsley
Projects I’ve worked on
- SleekFlow web app
- SleekFlow marketing website
- SleekFlow Partnership portal
- Deskchaser
Goodbye 2022, hello 2023:
Looking forward to 2023, I want to spend some time getting involved in the open source community and continue gaining different perspectives of how software can be built. There might be a few personal projects as well so stay tuned, but I’m not really sure what I want to build yet. We’ll have to see.
I couldn’t be more excited where technology is heading and the possibility it brings. Thank you to everyone who’ve made my year so fun!