I love DEV and the community that was built around it. This community is one of the most wholesome and kind communities out there. Reading comments is as enjoyable and informative as reading the articles themselves, which is quite rare for me.
During the past two years I saw the site grow and take shape, and community grow and flourish. I saw many functionalities being added and delightful UI changes.
And now it's my 2 year anniversary on this site. Yay! But how the time flies.
For my 2nd anniversary, I want to list off some milestones that I've managed to achieve so I might motivate you or give you some ideas. So let's start!
From lurker to contributor
During my first year, I was mostly lurking and reading articles. I wasn't really contributing my own articles or even comments. Right around my 1st year anniversary, I switched jobs and I felt that I might challenge myself with something new and start writing articles on a regular basis. I chose DEV because it was so easy to use, I enjoy writing with Markdown and I saw its potential early on.
16 week streak
Weekly streaks were a perfect way of keeping track of my challenge, so I've decided to write one or two articles a week for 16 weeks.
At the start, I was getting barely hundred views per articles. I want to link them here, because I am proud of these two articles. I remember putting a lot of work into them. Also they cover some advanced CSS topics not everyone is aware of, so I would like to give them some more exposure here.
After the first few articles I was achieving around 5000 views per article and was really excited. This was the time when I have also been tweeted out by DEV Twitter account, so I felt especially proud.
Somewhere around the middle of the 16-week challenge, I hit my first major success with the article on Image optimization for the web. This article really took off and was shared and republished around the Web, so I wrote some more articles in that in-depth style, with more catchy titles and they were also successful.
Those last few weeks flew by and I finally hit the 16 week streak! I felt a bit burnt-out in the end so I decided to take a short break and focus on other projects.
As an icing on the cake and an excellent start of 2020, I was recognized as one of the Top 500 DEV contributor for 2019.
Confidence boost
Seeing how many people enjoyed reading the articles on DEV and supported them gave me a large confidence boost. After 2 month break, I've decided to write for some professional publications. With significant success on DEV under my belt, I was sure that my pitches will be accepted and that I will be able to deliver high quality articles.
I've pitched an article to Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks, the websites that I've enjoyed reading and consider them the go-to sites for great and helpful content. Both got accepted and my first professional articles were published back in March and April, respectively.
Smashing Magazine - A Practical Overview Of CSS Houdini
CSS Tricks - Neumorphism and CSS
By supporting my articles, DEV and the community really helped me learn, grow, get out of my comfort zone, try out something new and achieve new milestones!
About a month ago, LogRocket invited me to write an article for their blog. So not only I was pitching articles to publications, I was also invited to write. It was really nice to get recognised in this way.
LogRocket - How to use Chromatic 2.0
Won Dev x Twilio Hackathon
This Hackathon came at the ideal time, as I was taking a break from writing articles and as COVID-19 hit Croatia, so I was staying at home much more than usual.
I've presented the Hackathon idea to my coworkers at PROTOTYP and five of us developed an awesome app in about 3 weeks. You can read more about the app in the submission post.
And we've won a grand prize in COVID-19 category! We were very proud of this achievement since it was a team effort and that is what really made the whole project so awesome in the end.
Career advancement
After hitting those major milestones, I started thinking about the ways I can advance my development career. This is the first time in the last few 6 years I have been thinking about it and had some ideas.
Although I cannot talk about the details yet, some awesome things are currently in the pipeline.
Wrapping up
Thanks to DEV community for the support and awesome two years on the platform. I really appreciate it! For anyone considering actively writing on DEV or currently working on their weekly streaks, I sincerely recommend doing all 16 weeks if possible. You might be surprised and amazed about what you can achieve in 16 weeks, and you might learn more about yourself and expand your horizons in the process.
All in all, stay awesome, DEV community!
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