This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.

2024 has been a Truly game-changer year for me.

As 2024 is coming to an end, I thought of documenting my journey, the lessons I’ve learned, and the milestones I’ve hit along the way.

This article won't be a very technical one!

So, Without delaying further,

Let's start!

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My DevRel Journey With Pieces for Developers

In March, I joined Pieces as a Developer Advocate, and this opportunity marked a pivotal moment in my journey!

I had started contributing to Pieces’s open-source projects in December 2023, so by the time I officially joined the team, I was already familiar with the SDKs and active in the community. This familiarity made onboarding much smoother.

The Team Members were very supportive and the DevRel Team helped me with all the resources to get started with the Devrel stuff.

Throughout my time in Pieces, I got a chance to work on a lot of stuff

• Open Source

• Community Building

• Developer Education

• Event Organising

• Docs

And Many more...

It was a great learning experience for me. I got the chance to collaborate with a lot of amazing folks and learn from their ocean of experience. This role pushed me to be more accountable, not just for the work I did but for how it performed and how I could scale it further.

The Major Project I worked on was our ProductHunt Launch!

It was hectic, chaotic, and fun all at once. We started planning two months in advance, focusing on collaborations, community interactions, and events to engage with our developer community.

I still remember that on Launch Day, I had one exam at my uni but I was attending live-streams and answering queries while traveling on a bus. It might sound funny, but it wasn’t that funny : )

But to be honest, I was so excited that I kept scrolling the ProductHunt Page every Five seconds

Finally, All the Hard Work paid off, We became ProductHunt Product of the Day 🤍

After Working for more than 7 months, I left Pieces around October.

To sum up, I had a wonderful time in Pieces, and I am truly grateful to the Team for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow together.

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Personal Milestones

Now, Let me share some of my (Small) achievements. In 2024, I was able to complete a few things that I had on my bucket list.

Paid College Fees

First on my bucket list was, Paying my College Fees. I know, It is not that big thing for many, But believe me, it was a BIG thing for me. I felt so good to be able to bear my fees.

Bought My First Apple Product

Growing up, I had this goal of buying an Apple product, but with my money. And this year, I finally made it happen! After months of hard work and saving, I bought my first MacBook with my own money.

Blogs Got Featured

2 Years ago, when I started writing Technical Articles, I had this on my bucket list My blog would get featured.

This year, that happened when one of my articles got featured on Hashnode! And honestly, it made all those hours of writing feel so worth it.

Some Metrics Worth Celebrating

This year wasn’t just about personal milestones but also about reaching significant professional benchmarks:

• Crossed 5k followers on Twitter (X).

• Surpassed 400k+ views on my DevTo blogs.

• Hit 10k+ followers on DevTo.

• My blogs started getting featured on Google Quicksearchbox, Daily.Dev and some other places.

• Achieved 75k+ views on my Hashnode blogs.

To everyone who supported, read, and resonated with my work, thank you! You made this journey so special.

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Open Source Contributions & Recognition

Open source has always been close to my heart!

From the start of my journey, I’ve been a huge advocate for open source, and contributing to it has been one of my favorite things to do.

One Day, I got an opportunity to contribute to One of my Dream Projects, Next.js by Vercel.

But it wasn’t easy at all! The Hardest part for me was to understand the codebase. It was overwhelming for me in the beginning. But after spending hours - four, maybe five, I started understanding the codebase a bit.

Eventually, after multiple attempts (and some much-needed help from an engineer on the team), my PR got merged.

That moment?

I was literally on cloud nine, grinning ear to ear.

And, For this Contribution, I was Mentioned in the Next.js 15 RC Blog. It felt like a dream come true, like all those hours of learning and contributing had truly paid off.

But, I haven’t stopped there, I’ve already started working on another issue for Next.js, and it’s still in progress. Fingers crossed that this one makes it in too.

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Freelancing Journey

2024 was a game-changer for my freelancing journey. Looking back, it’s crazy to see how far I’ve come—thanks to being active online and consistently sharing my work. That consistency opened up so many doors for freelance gigs.

This Year, I did a lot of Freelancing gigs, Some were small and some were really big. Every single one taught me something new and gave me the chance to refine my skills while building my personal brand.

Back in 2023, When I did my first paid gig, It was around 2.5k INR (~30usd). Fast forward to now, and I landed my biggest solo gig that’s around $2.3k USD!

To all the Freelancers, My Suggestion will be to focus on showcasing your skills publicly. Share what you know, what you’re building, and the challenges you’ve overcome.

That’s exactly what helped me get my first few clients. And once the ball starts rolling, it just keeps going.

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In-Person Events

In-person events are a great way to network and connect with like-minded people.

This year, I had the chance to attend some incredible events that left me both inspired and grateful.

1. DevStudioCon by Wix

2. DevRelCon India

3. HackDay By Couchbase and Cloudflare

These Events gave me a platform to connect with the Amazing Developer Community and with the Folks I always followed and learned from.

Let’s start with DevStudioCon by Wix. It was my first time traveling to Bangalore, and I was beyond excited. Walking into the venue, I felt like a kid in a candy store.

And the best part? Meeting folks I’d always admired, like Francesco, Hitesh, Striver, Pratham, and Shivay.I interacted with them, asked questions and Surprisingly few of them knew me from my work!

Believe me, this feeling was something else!

In December, I again went to Bangalore to attend DevRelCon India! And this also was an amazing event filled with insightful sessions from Seasoned Devrels. Got to know a lot of Tips and Tricks around Developer Relations from them.

And, One of the memorable days of this year rather my life is the Birthday celebration at DevRelCon India!

It was CRAZY!

On the Second day of DevRelCon, 7th December 2024, I had my birthday, So the organizers planned to celebrate my birthday!

And honestly, it was one of the most heartwarming surprises of my life. Imagine celebrating your special day with a room full of techies.

After DevRelCon, I had a few days on my hand so I decided to take part in a HackDay organized by Cloudflare and Couchbase.

There I had two great sessions around Cloudflare AI Workers and Couchbase. After the session, we had a Small hackathon where we had to build a Project using Cloudflare AI Workers and Couchbase.

I took the challenge and Built a “Hot Tweet Generator” Which basically understands your way of writing Tweets and generates new Tweets on the Topic you want.

I wasn’t able to add all the functionalities that I wanted to but was able to build the MVP and gave a Demo of that! The whole experience was a mix of nerves, fun, and a LOT of learning.

These events weren’t just about networking or projects. They were about stepping out of my comfort zone, meeting incredible people, and soaking in the energy of the developer community.

And I can’t wait to do it all over again next year!

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Starting our Agency

This has to be the craziest thing I did this year—and trust me, it wasn’t even on my bucket list! I started my own agency!

While I was doing Freelancing, the biggest problem I had was “I Can’t Do everything”. It was getting very hard for me to do multiple projects with my current work. That’s when the idea of creating an agency hit me.

I called Amitesh, my teammate from Pieces, and told him the Plan. And Luckily he agreed to join me in this Journey!

And just like that, We started working behind the scenes for our Agency “Studio1”. Thanks to some of my previous clients, getting our first project was relatively easy.

From then We started building our Core team, We started with 5 writers. Now We have around 18+ Experienced Writers from different domains.

But the journey was not smooth always, We made a lot of mistakes, messed up some projects, and failed to deliver some on deadlines. We got to learn a lot from those Mistakes and We kept fixing those gaps.

A brief about Studio1

Studio1 is our agency dedicated to helping companies with technical content and developer advocacy consultancy. Our mission? To scale developer communities through impactful content and strategies.

Currently, We have 3 main Services:

• Technical Content

• Developer Advocacy

• Documentation

But we’re planning to add more services.

Till now we’re working with:

• YC Backed companies

• Nasdaq listed companies

• New Startups

• And many more…

We recently helped multiple companies with their ProductHunt launches and Launch Weeks.

Launching our Agency

After months of working behind the scenes, We officially launched our Agency Site this December: Studio1Hq.com.

Here’s the Launch Post:

PS: This was unplanned too, I literally pushed the code five minutes before the launch! 😅

Landing NASDAQ listed Client

To date, This is our biggest Client!

The Company saw our work and reached out to us for collaboration, This is the best part of Building in Public!

For anyone starting their agency journey, building in public isn't just about transparency, it's a powerful edge factor that builds trust and attracts opportunities.

Reaching $10k+ in 4 months

Our First milestone for Studio1 is that we reached $10K+ in revenue in 4 months!

This milestone is just the beginning, and we’re excited to scale this even further, reaching new heights and breaking new records in the coming months.

Every project has taught us something new, whether about client management, content strategy, or team coordination. We're taking these lessons and using them to build a stronger foundation for even bigger goals ahead.

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Next Plans

Moving Forward, In 2025 My Plan is to Grow our Agency to scale better. Here's what we're planning:

• Expand our team with more talented writers and developers.

• Add new services that serve the developer community better.

• Build a strong community around technical content creation.

I’m not focused on hitting any specific monetary targets for now. Our main focus will be delivering top-notch services to our clients and making sure we're always providing value.

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That's a Wrap!

If you enjoyed this journey and want more content like this, feel free to follow me here:

For Paid collaboration mail me at: arindammajumder2020@gmail.com.

Thank you for Reading till the end.