Midway through 2023 - My Learnings and experiences. [Part 1]

This is an article about my learnings and experiences in the year 2023 from January to June.

I am dividing the journey into two parts where in the first segment I will be sharing about the first three months of 2023, my previous backgrounds and my mindset back then, and also I will be mentioning my key learnings from the first 3 months.

Phase 1 [Jan-march]

The start of the year is filled with excitement! new hopes, and new year resolutions! I was on to the end of my first freelance project, where I worked day in and day out. I worked on an MVP for an Indian startup, who were offering mentoring services for JEE and NEET aspirants. With lots of hard work, commitment and continuous learning I created a full-stack application based on Reactjs and Firebase for this client.

The link for the website you can find here : https://63fcbe967e66861c69922036--celebrated-ganache-f533dd.netlify.app/

It was clear in my head till this point that I needed to focus on learning and use my curiosity to explore new domains and sharpen my skills. I was also fond of creating my online presence and growing my network. I had a simple goal in my head, "I wanted to improve my tech skills and sharpen them continuously and expand my network to get connected to more and more like-minded individuals to share and learn in a collaborative environment "

In the same month after finishing my first freelance project, I started to build my online portfolio website, with a clear goal to make it public after my semester exams.

At this time, I started to talk with a lot of industry people, who were more experienced than me and understood the path that I was on. A conversation shooted in my head and the very next day I started to implement their guidance and let my own experience drive my way forward: That's where I pulled an allnighter and created the foundation for my updated portfolio website, purchased my domain and just made it live with all nessacary configurations.

Here's my portfolio website : https://siddharthchopda.tech/

I started to go on for any opportunity that might come my way and allowed my inner curiosity to experiment and learn. I started participating in hackathons and started to actively build my online presence and my LinkedIn network.

In Feb, I worked on various small projects and interviewed for 2 companies, and I was rejected by both of them because I took more time to complete their coding assignments. Although I was rejected by both of them, I had a strong belief in my abilities and I kept going and put all of my focus on improving myself and developing my skills. I noticed for the past few months, I have been working with other technologies and hence I could not complete the assignments. I figured out my mistakes and tried to learn from them and focused on moving forward.

March and the Rajasthan IT Day,

"Actual learning starts when you work in a team", that's so true. I went on for this national-level hackathon with two of my college seniors, my batchmate and one junior. Although I didn't know anything about Augmented reality. I went on with my curiosity to learn. It was an amazing 3-day hackathon, where learning and teamwork were the key takeaways.

The Rajasthan IT Day, shaped my mindset and opened me up to the real possibilities that are there in tech. The experience of working with 5000+ developers under the same roof was astonishing.

Phase 1 - Learnings :

The key learnings I had from these first three months of 2023 could be summarized into these five points :

1. Consistency is everything: I failed two coding assignments in a row because my consistency was broken and once I started to regain my momentum and started to consistently work on improving my skills, it all became a cakewalk.

2. The right opportunity is the one where you learn and grow: If you focus on improving yourself and learning. You are making yourself capable of the next opportunities.

3. Networking and growing your network is the best thing that you can do in your career.

That's The first part of my journey this year, The next parts were unexpectedly challenging and superbly amazing, which I am super excited to document and share with the world. The overall journey increased my confidence in working towards what ignites you from within and exploring all different possibilities in the path that you wanna walk into.

Yes, working in tech is not a cake walk and it's a continuous process of re-inventing yourself daily to keep up with things. But if you are doing something within your interest and you are passionate about it, that's where you enjoy everything about it.

In the later parts I would be writing about my experiences on "How networking and continously improving your skills got me my first US based client". If you get a positive message and find value in this blog. Feel free to add your comments , like share and follow me here for the upcoming blogs.

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