Hey friends! Without challenges, the journey is not fun, and when you achieve something despite having challenges, sharing is a great gift to give someone.

For me, 2022 was a year of challenges but I achieved and learned many things that I am thankful for. Let me show you the achievements.

1. Completing My 60 Days DevOps Challenge
2. Starting a Blog on Hashnode
3. Getting 2000 Followers on Twitter
4. Getting 600 Subscribers on YouTube
5. Taking Part in the KubeCon
6. Attending My First Session with Ramón Huidobro and Second Session with Nikita Koselev.

The first 4 points are interconnected. One was not possible without the other. But I will try to explain each of them separately.

1. Completing My 60 Days DevOps Challenge 🏆

It all began when 2022 started and I decided to contribute to the Kubernetes project. After this immediate thought, I opened the Kubernetes GitHub repo and forked, and cloned it.

I was not aware of anything about Kubernetes. I just heard from Kunal Kushwaha and cloned the project but when I opened a file, it was very difficult for me to understand.

I quickly realized that I know nothing about Kubernetes. So I decided to learn it first and then apply it.

Resources

I learned from many resources but some of the major resources are:

• Kunal Kushwaha YouTube channel

• Michael Cade 90 Days of DevOps

• Technical Guftgu YouTube channel

• TechWorld with Nana YouTube channel

• Spacelift blogs

While learning from these resources, I was making notes also. I saw that these people are teaching awesome but one person was teaching the tools that another person was not teaching and vice versa.

After some days, I thought to myself why don't I take my prepared notes that are taken from different resources and teach them in one place? That's where the 60 Days DevOps journey began.

Challenge

I started recording the videos of DevOps and they were going very well. I recorded 22 videos but when I tried to record the 23rd video, my laptop was not able to record it because it was very slow and was only able to browse the internet for me.

As a result, I paused my journey due to my slow laptop and that was an unpleasant moment for me but I didn't stop there. I had some savings also but they were not enough for me to buy a laptop. So I borrowed money from my friends and family and it took me four months to manage the money for a laptop.

During these four months, I completed my 60 Days DevOps notes, started writing blogs on hashnode, and started working on another project also(both of which I will be discussing later on in this blog).

Happy moment

Finally, the happy moment came when I got a laptop on 2nd October. On that day, I woke up at 5 AM and went straight to the bus station to get a laptop. The courier service was not delivering the laptop due to some issues. On the same day, I tweeted about it also.

That was a happy moment for me and I became confident that I will continue my DevOps journey again.

Started my journey again

After receiving my laptop, I set it up and resumed the recording of my project videos. At this time, I worked hard to provide videos in a short period of time because I didn't record a single video in these four months.

I was continuously posting my progress on Twitter, showing my work every day and getting the attention of the student community.

When the 60 Days challenge was completed, I became very happy and celebrated the journey with my friends. We had a party together.

Before the release of the videos, I promoted them so much in the community that they gave me great results.

Get access

• Here is the GitHub repo in which I have written all the notes of the DevOps. You can check them out.

In just 2 weeks of uploading the notes on GitHub, I got 72 stars and 15 forks. Here is a picture of it:

• Here is the YouTube playlist in which I have given all the videos of DevOps. Some of them are released and some of them are scheduled to be released.

2. Starting a Blog on Hashnode ✍️

I was not interested in writing a blog. It was not because I didn't try. The reason was that I was not familiar with hashnode.

Before writing in hashnode, I tried out medium also but it was not giving me the environment to write blogs for it. Everyone from any field was writing blogs in the medium. But I wanted a platform in which developers and software engineers are welcomed and they could write easily in an inclusive environment.

In that challenging time when I waited for four months to get a new laptop, I got introduced to hashnode from Kunal. I immediately created an account on August 06, 2022, and started writing blogs.

At first, it was hard for me but the more I wrote, the more I realized that blogging can help you understand the concepts easily because you have to mention everything step-by-step so that a reader could understand.

Blogs that got more views

Up until now, I have written sixteen blogs and these are some of the blogs that have more views as compared to other blogs.

• Golang Case Study
• How to Implement JWT-based authentication in Golang?
• What is Ansible and how it is different from other configuration management tools?
• Hello World of Terraform

3. Getting 2000 Followers on Twitter 🚀

When I started using Twitter, I was not sure how to build a community. I just started commenting on other people's posts because that was the only way for me to interact with people.

I was also posting tweets but they were not getting many views. Slowly after some time I realized that people don't care how much you have learned. They only care about how much value and how many resources you provide them to learn.

I am thankful to Eddie Jaoude and Marino Wijay who followed me at an earlier stage when I had only 200 followers.

What I learned is that the more you post content to help people, the more they will be attracted. Sharing a motivational quote won't help you in the long run.

That's the reason that when I posted my DevOps journey, one of the posts went viral. Below is the tweet that attracted many people and my number of followers reached to 1000.

Here is a tweet about the topics of DevOps that went more viral than the previous one and attracted more people. At that time, many people were DMing me and asking me about the release date of the DevOps series.

After this tweet, I was near to get 2000 followers. Because I created such a hype in the community that many people followed me earlier and as a result, the videos got more viewership when they were released and I reached 2000 followers easily.

4. Getting 600 Subs on YouTube 🎈

My YouTube subscription also went from 80 subscribers to 600 after only releasing 8 videos of DevOps. I followed a strategy by promoting a service before the release and it gave me great results.

5. Taking Part in the KubeCon ✨

Registration Story

In October I watched Kunal's video about KubeCon. I moved to the KubeCon website and checked whether I can apply for it or not.

At first, I thought, it would be FREE but when I visited the website, I came to know that it is not FREE and I also missed the $10 early bird opportunity.

For me, it was very disappointing and I thought that I won't be able to attend the conference this year. I literally had no thought of tweeting about this but somehow I tweeted it.

When I woke up in the morning and opened my laptop, I saw that many people DMed me including Chris Aniszczyk who gave me a FREE virtual ticket to take a part in the KubeCon.

It was a very happy moment for me and I was finally able to take the conference.

Starting Story

The conference started with the Keynote and it was full of energy. I can't describe how happy I was while attending my first conference virtually.

The keynote host was Priyanka Sharma and the guests were Heba and Yuan Tang. Priyanka welcomed all the participants globally and told many interesting things about KubeCon. I was blown away during this conference.

I set up my schedule to watch many events and I mentioned those events in my other blog also which you can check out from here.

Some of the events that I enjoyed the most are the following.

1. Mentor-Mentee Framework To Build the Next Generation Of Cloud Native by Kunal Kushwaha & Mark Boost. Here is the thread that I wrote about it.

2. The 10 Biggest Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make In Open Source by Bill Mulligan and Divya Mohan. Here is the thread also that I wrote about it.

6. Attending Sessions 😊

First session with Ramón Huidobro

On 2nd November, Eddie announced that he will do a special giveaway after reaching 100k followers. The giveaway was to provide mentorship sessions from many awesome mentors to people like me and others also.

I liked it, retweeted it, and added a comment on it. When Eddie got 100k followers, he selected 22 people to provide mentorship. Among them, I was also selected to have a mentorship session with Ramon Huidobro.

After that, I DMed Ramon, and we set up a session date and time. It was my first session online so I was a little nervous but Ramon was very helpful and we talked for more than 30 minutes during which I asked him many questions, like Twitter VS LinkedIn, Prerequisites of DevRel, etc.

You can get the recording of that video from here.

Second Session with Nikita Koselev

The session with Nikita was unsure. I woke up in the morning and at 7:00 AM I opened my laptop and we had a chat on Twitter in which I asked him to talk via video. He agreed and we started video calling on Google Meet.

We talked about multiple things like open source, building a community, sharing your learnings in public, etc. He provided me with many resources and boosted my confidence in content creation.

Nikita also gave me the Co-Organizer role in his community called Together, We Open Source. In this community, he guides people on how to learn and earn through open source. The conversation went for one hour from 7 to 8 AM.

What I learned from 2022?

This year has taught me many things that I want to share with you. I hope it will help you in the future also.

• Process is more important than the result. If you're stuck in a problem then you can't get the result directly. Instead, go through the process of solving the mini-problems that will ultimately give you the required results.

• Find the opportunities in a problem. When I was unable to record the DevOps videos on my old laptop, I didn't stop there. Instead, I worked on making the notes, created the hashnode account to start writing blogs in it, and created the newsletter on Twitter which has currently gotten 120 subscribers.

• Don't be afraid to take the opportunities if they're offered. Although I was disappointed that I won't be able to attend the KubeCon this year but when I was offered a KubeCon ticket, I accepted it and as a result, I learned many things and I won my first swag from Robusta which I received a few days before.

And lastly, one of the most important things is

• Only sharing your learning is not enough. You need to make those learnings accessible and understandable to people also. I was trying to learn the DevOps stuff but after some time, I thought why don't I teach those things to others that I am learning myself in order to help them?

One who treads a path in search of knowledge has his path to Paradise made easy by God.

~ Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H)

That's my journey in 2022. The next step is to resume my work on the project that I paused when I got a new laptop. I will make the project open source so that anybody can contribute to it and I will share the details of it on my socials also.

You can follow me on YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Wishing everyone Happy Holidays, I'll see you in 2023.