What's up with the number 4?

This week I was checking out my email to catch up with things from the previous week.

There was nothing out of the ordinary initially.

But then, I found something that snapped me out of my ordinary email-checking state.

You wanna know what it was?

Well, nothing more and nothing less than a new badge in dev.to.

But not any kind of badge mind you.

It was THIS badge.

Yo, that's a big, cool-looking number 4.

"Can you believe it's been 4 years already?!"

I couldn't believe it at first. But on further inspection, I found it's true.

It got me doing a trip down memory lane to the second half of 2018.

I remember that I had seen some posts from folks here going around. And after several of them, I ended up thinking "let's just sign up for this site right? why not?"

I didn't have very much activity on the site until August of that year when I wrote about experiences in a short coding boot-camp that I took.

The response I got was pretty positive. Initially, I was just reading/learning from posts and commenting on those, no writing on my part.

It wasn't until the beginning of 2020 that "writing" became part of my "new year resolutions".

I wrote only 2 posts before realizing "damn, this writing thing is actually hard".

Then, the pandemic struck and everything came crashing down.

In June I started writing again after a period of depression and nihilism. Writing on this platform and sharing knowledge was one of the ways I used to cope with the situation and keep moving on.

From there, I've gone to develop my writing skill…

Had writing streaks for many weeks…

Learnt a lot from tech and otherwise…

Met incredibly smart, cool, talented people…

And be part of one of the best communities for developers on the internet.

It's been quite a journey with ups and downs but definitely never a boring one.

I'm looking forward to what may come in the future and hopefully keep doing this challenging, but rewarding activity for more years to come.

So, cheers for this anniversary and another year to come.

And as always… Thanks for reading!