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Jennifer Fadriquela
Jennifer Fadriquela

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2020 Year-End Thoughts

Year 2020. I know this year would live in infamy for me and my generation. Memes have been comparing staying at home similar to being drafted in the military during WW2. The beginning of the year looked like a decent 10 minutes introduction for a Black Mirror episode and everyone was in the brink of paranoia. Like many others, I was stressed whenever I see Covid infections and deaths just sky-rocket everyday.

It was early March when we received the memo that we will have a work from home setup. At first, I thought that this will be just a 1 week thing. Turns out, it was for the entire year.

I took this opportunity to learn new stuff and develop my skills (while making sure I put my Netflix account to good use lol).

For starters, I continued studying mobile development. I was planning to do a mobile app for a Capstone Project for my master's. It was the 2nd quarter of the year - contact tracing and quarantine passes was all the rage. I made two mini-projects - QR Code Quarantine Pass and Bluetooth POC for contact tracing. Though I'm not sure if these apps will make the cut for my master's, I'm happy with the fact that I built something using Flutter.

Nearly the same time, I decided to put up a dev journal. I had an existing account in Medium and published a couple of articles in the past but I realized I wanted a targeted audience so I switched here in dev.to. Currently, I have a decent amount of articles here hoping that I'll be benefitting from them in the future or someone who needs dev how-to's and guides will find it useful.

At the beginning of third quarter, I was so stressed on the state of the economy and thought about getting a side hustle in case something bad happens to my day job. I began browsing Upwork and noticed there's a lot of demand for data extraction. I learned webscraping (wrote an article about it) and tried my luck in getting a side project. Fortunately, my hardwork in studying python/selenium, bidding and submitting proposals paid-off and I had three short-term projects.

Towards the end of the year, I got a potential gig that required me to learn Laravel and Vue.js. The gig never materialized but I did not regret spending time in studying these two frameworks.

As of now, I just finished an Ethereum and React course from Udemy. I'm currently building some sort of Cryptokitties clone based on ERC-1155. This tech made me realize the potentials of blockchain and I'm thinking of pursuing this as one my main skillset.

I had downtime or some sort of writer's block every now and then. There are days that I just wanted to make it through my day job and watch a movie at the end of the day. On these moments, I just let the laziness drain from my body hoping that tomorrow I will be refreshed.

2020 taught me that I can learn anything if I just put my mind into it.

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