My Word for 2022: Jump

Navigating the World of Content Creation and Software Engineering: My Review of 2022

The Road to GDE and WTM Ambassador

Scene one: “It’s raining. You’re standing on a little island in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cold water. On the other side of the ocean, it’s sunny and there are some opportunities. Would you jump in the almost freezing water and swim toward the promising land?” The coach asked.

“Well, judging while being an outsider is totally different from being an insider,” I said, hesitating to give an answer to that torturing question.

For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. Eventually, it dawned on me that maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing right now in some areas of my life; swimming in the cold water toward a better, bigger land.

Thought one: “This has been the Year of the Wait. A year of going nowhere. Which is probably why I was headed to a dance class. I wanted to end the year by moving, even if it was just around a 300-square-foot hardwood floor. If I could move in some way, perhaps I could convince myself that I was moving forward,” wrote Julio Vincent Gambuto recently.

Although I still have areas where I need to improve, I don’t consider myself as someone stuck in life. But 2020 and 2021 have been a harsh reality check for me: there are no simple shortcuts to achieving my ambitious goals. Waiting for some magic buttons to open new doors won’t get me anywhere.

Unlike Vincent Gambuto, I didn’t head to a dance class as a way to move forward. Instead, I kept up with my workouts at home and chose to persist and be patient, even if it meant taking baby steps.

Scene two: It’s -2°C outside. The clock is striking 8:30 a.m in Pinneberg. I glanced at the snow covering the plants and the store roof from the glass wall next to me. Because of the freezing temperature, it didn’t melt yet.

I turned back to my screen wondering if I received an answer to my proposal for the meeting date. I checked my inbox. But there was no new message.

“Maybe he’s too busy or on vacation. His team already notified me about a slight delay in the process because of the coming Holiday break. Let’s be patient for the next couple of weeks.” I thought to myself.

We’re nearing the end of the year and I feel very excited about the next step in my road, which would be a product interview with a Program Lead at Google.

Thought two: In 2022, my life underwent so many changes, as did the world around me. I turned a new age, changed my full-time job twice, released my first Udemy video course, and became more confident as a content creator.

In February, the war that raged in Ukraine reflected the unrest in the world around us. Amid the downturn of the global economy, goods and energy prices continued to increase. The Great Resignation and mass layoffs became common themes due to the unstable employment landscape.

However, there was also a shift in the atmosphere. After a long period of social distancing, people were able to roam the streets and attend in-person events more freely.

Throughout all of this, my daily routine remained unchanged: I woke up, prepared my cup of tea, coded, created content, and went to bed. Now I have one more thing: attend the RoadToGDE and WTM meetings organized by Google. It’s overwhelming and exhausting at times, but overall, it feels rewarding.

A Trip Around the Sun

Last January, I published an article about my journey as a content creator in 2021. Now that the year 2022 is coming to a close, I want to reflect on it with you.

In the following sections, I’ll review the changes I experienced, where I am now, and where I’m headed in the future.

Video Production

One remarkable thing about 2022 is that I worked again as a full-time software engineer and continued to produce and publish online content next to my job.

I’ve also pushed myself toward visual content by learning how to produce better videos than the ones I published in 2021. For someone who used to be a shy person with very little experience in that field, that was a daunting task. But I gave myself a chance to grow in the role.

Unlike the writing game, in which I sit down in silence with my thoughts and try to transform them into words, the video production activity demands multiple parts of me to play together: my thoughts, my scripts, my voice tone, my body language, and my editing skill.

One video took me over 80 hours to finish without compromising on the quality I wanted to achieve. While it didn’t go viral on YouTube, it made me proud.

In total, I added 11 new videos to my YouTube channel in 2022, which are not all faceless, and achieved the one thousand subscribers milestone.

With encouragement from an ex-boss of mine, I published as well my first Udemy video course “Memory Leaks 101: How to Identify, Diagnose, and Fix Them in Web Apps.” I’m glad it has over 13K students from all over the world right now.

It took me 220 hours to produce these videos. I could split this effort between writing the scripts, screen recording, voiceover, looking for video sequences and images, and editing.

The right column in the following table shows the number of hours I’ve invested per video — I split some of these videos into multiple parts when I published them:

Writing

In 2022, I witnessed different phases. Between April and August, I struggled with the complexity of cloud computing and how it reduces developers’ productivity and terribly increases their learning curves. That said, this phase was a great opportunity to get my feet wet with AWS services and serverless architectures and share what I’ve learned about it in a few articles and a video:

• Mastering the Cloud: My Story of Surviving the Toughest Times as a Software Engineer
• How to Validate a Field in a Microservices Architecture
• Behind the Scenes: A Day in the Life of an AWS Developer
• Daily Scrums: A major stressor for developers? Here’s why
• Video: Visualizing Your AWS Environment: How to Use Cloudmapper to Generate Diagrams

The total number of articles I published on Medium in 2022 is 16 — including the current one. It took me 372.5 hours to produce them. The right column in the following table shows the number of hours I’ve invested per article:

My most popular three pieces for 2022 are:

1. Memory Leaks 101: The Essential Guide to Detecting and Fixing Them in Your Web App
2. What’s New in Angular 15
3. Daily Scrums: A major stressor for developers? Here’s why

Another milestone I’m proud of achieving this year is the 500K views for my content on Medium:

The Road to GDE

Toward the end of August, I became a member of a group of 40 people selected to take part in the Google three-month program: the Road to Google Developer Expert (GDE).

The mentees in the program were from all over the world and have a variety of technical backgrounds. They are planning to apply to different GDE titles: Google cloud, ML, Android, Web Technologies, Angular, Flutter, and so on.

They have also different skills:

• Some were better than others at community building and event organization.
• Some were good at public speaking and had some public talks in their profiles, but struggled with writing their first blog posts.
• Some participants, like Verena Zaiser, made it to publish a book and host a podcast.
• Others have a positive impact on the community thanks to the content they have created.

So, towards the end of the RoadToGDE, on December 1, I sent my application to Google to become a GDE after filling out the mock application and getting feedback about it from my mentor Martina Kraus and the managers of the RoadToGDE program.

On December 7, I got the invitation to the GDE community interview after successfully passing the eligibility check.

The meeting took a place in December 2022, with an Angular GDE from Greece, from whom I got some encouraging words like “you would make a great GDE,” which was pleasant to hear.

On December 14, I got an invitation to the Product Interview with a member of the Angular team.

It’s worth mentioning that this was not my first application to the GDE program. In 2021, I also applied for it and succeeded in the eligibility check and the community interview with Angular GDE Deborah Kurata. But after the product interview, I got a rejection.

At the time, I had under my belt:

• One talk at the enterJS 2021 conference.
• A bunch of open-source repositories on GitHub.
• About 100 articles on Medium with over 200K views in total (for my technical and non-technical posts) and 2K+ followers.
• About 20 videos on my YouTube channel — just very few of them are about Angular. The total number of subscribers on the channel was less than 100 subscribers, and the total number of views was about 5K.
• A substack newsletter with less than 100 subscribers.

During the product interview, I was recommended to continue to grow my YouTube channel and give talks in the Hamburg Angular Meetups, which is the nearest Angular community to me.

But of course, to decide whether you as a candidate are ready to get the GDE title, the Google team doesn’t rely just on your knowledge, your mentorship ability, and your impact on the community, but they consider as well your motivation and the reason you want this role.

Women Techmakers (WTM) Ambassador

In one of the RoadToGDE sessions, the organizers introduced the WTM program and encouraged us to apply for it, which is what I did.

By November 15, I officially became a WTM Ambassador 🎉.

The OnBoarding and Kick-off meetings followed on November 30 and December 12.

Final Thought

As 2023 approaches, I am glad that I honed a more personal and reflective writing style that involves:

• using scenes and thoughts as a way to structure my reflections,
• and including anecdotes and observations to illustrate my points.

I’m also proud of using descriptive language, providing specific details about my experiences, and being able to integrate an introspective and thoughtful tone in my pieces.

I’m looking forward to sharing more exciting content next year and never hesitate to take a calculated risk when it’s the best decision to make.

What are your thoughts on 2022? Do you have any specific strategies for rolling with the punches and achieving your goals? Do you plan to apply to the GDE program?

If so, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section. Thank you for being here and I wish you all the best in your future endeavors!

Update on February 22, 2023: Today I officially become a Google Developer Expert in Angular 🎉

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