Hey there again guys!
It’s been almost two months since my last post. And in the back of my head, there was this constant thought:
“I need to get ...
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Hey Aryan! Thanks for the mention! A lot has happened in the last couple months and glad you are doing well!
My friends wanted me to watch One Piece, but I don't have that capacity to watch a lot of seasons and episodes. Probably wait until they released "THE" One Piece or watch the Netflix adaptation. Other than that, been watching Mob Psycho 100 and it is quite good so far in my opinion!
Other than that, finished the semester! Great timing too since now I can focus on projects I wanted to do! If you want, me, @javz, @konark_13, and @jarvisscript are in a group Called Virual Coffee if you would like to join and talk there! Great community to be in!
You will always be my Follower number 1 (You are my first follower on Dev.to!) and I am grateful you still remember me back in January when I first join and commented on your post on "Learning after Graduation"! I appreciate the support you gave early on when I first started posting my Monthly Dev Report and such!
Welcome back to Dev.to! If you are busy in the future, you will always have a home here and you are welcome back anytime! Thanks and hoping to see you post in the future :D
Francis this comment actually made me emotional a little bit ngl 😭
And WAIT YOU STILL REMEMBER THE COMMENT??? That’s actually so wholesome man whattt.
But honestly I’m really glad you kept posting. Watching your consistency, your monthly reports, your experiments, your curiosity around building stuff, it’s genuinely been fun seeing your growth in real time.
Also congrats on finishing the semester!! That timing sounds PERFECT honestly.
And YES I’d absolutely love to join the Virtual Coffee group 👀 How do I sign up?
That sounds like exactly the kind of community I’d enjoy being around.
Also:
Mob Psycho 100 = peak.
BUT One Piece is absolutely worth it btw 😤 YOU SHOULD TOTALLY TRY THE MANGA, that way you can read at your own pace and pick up whenever you like, totally worth it!
The number looks terrifying until suddenly you emotionally live there.
Really appreciate this comment man. Seriously.
Thanks Aryan! Yes, I tend to have good memory since it really mattered to me. I also remember early on, I also read @sylwia-lask and posted a comment (though I don't know who I commented first if it was you or Sylwia). Either way, both of you guys are the first thing I saw when I came here and appreciated your support and inclusiveness on DEV!
I will try to see if I can get into the Manga, though I never own any Manga in particular. We shall see!
For the Virtual Coffee, can you sign up here: virtualcoffee.io/resources/virtual...
You will be put on the waitlist, but you should be able to get in. I can also ask to let them know you are on the waitlist. Just lmk!
Thanks again Aryan! Also, what's the project you and @webdeveloperhyper are building??? 👀
Can't wait :D
That honestly means a lot man 😭
And yeah, I think that’s one of the coolest things about DEV. Sometimes one encouraging interaction early on can completely change whether someone keeps writing or disappears quietly. For me it was @webdeveloperhyper.
Also YES I already filled the form for Virtual Coffee 👀
Really looking forward to meeting everyone there honestly. Feels like exactly the kind of space/community I’ve been missing lately.
And about the project with @webdeveloperhyper …
we’re just trying to cook something better than our previous version of dev collab project 😭 just an upgrade on the ui and features lol.
Still polishing things up before properly revealing it, but it’s probably the most effort we’ve put into a collab project so far. Very excited to release it LOL. Maybe next week :)
You’re welcome! I’m happy to hear I was helpful. 😄
Sounds good to hear you guys came together early on!
For Aryan, I notify the group leader about your on the waitlist! Check your email for updates!
We should do a group collab on one project where it is you, me, @webdeveloperhyper, @javz, @konark_13, and @sylwia-lask! It would be the biggest collab on Dev.to history! We can build anything we want. Let me know!
Welcome back @itsugo ! I was actually thinking about you from time to time and appreciate your dropping in with a comment occasionally :)
Was great reading up on your latest, there are a lot of accomplishements and learnings there. Comic Con must have been so fun!
Looking forward to what you build next.
Thank you Julien 😭
Really means a lot hearing that honestly. And yeah Comic Con was ridiculously fun LOL. Felt nice doing something completely unserious for once.
Also appreciate you always being around on DEV. Your posts/comments genuinely make the space feel more human.
It’s refreshing to see someone value the "non-GitHub" gains like systems thinking and soft skills.
Honestly that’s something I’ve been slowly realizing lately too.
For the longest time I only counted “real progress” as visible output like projects, commits, deployments etc. But understanding people, systems, communication and decision-making changes how you approach building entirely.
Feels less flashy than code sometimes, but probably compounds harder long term.
building in your head while life speeds up is still building. the writing debt feeling is real but it shouldn't be a timer on the actual work.
“writing debt” is such a painfully accurate phrase 😭
And yeah, I think I needed to realize that not every growth phase looks productive from the outside. Sometimes the visible output slows down because the internal model is changing faster than the external one.
Appreciate this comment a lot honestly.
honestly that's exactly it - the recalibration doesn't produce anything you can ship or point at. just have to trust it's doing real work. took me way too long to stop needing the visible proof for that.
Yeah exactly 😭
I think I spent a long time only trusting growth that could be “measured” somehow. XP bars, commits, certifications, output, visible proof etc.
But lately a lot of the important growth has felt quieter than that. More like changes in how I think, communicate, react, or approach problems.
Hard to quantify. But very real.
yeah the quiet stuff is the real stuff. the XP bar growth is easy to track because someone designed it to be visible. the other kind just makes you slightly less wrong over time and you mostly notice it looking back.
Welcome back, Aryan.
The marketing detour is not a detour—it’s a competence multiplier.
You may think you're “trying marketing.”
What you're actually doing is:
This is the exact skillset that turns a developer into someone who can move a system, not just operate inside it.
This actually reframed the whole experience in a way I hadn’t fully articulated yet.
I originally treated marketing as “the thing outside building” but lately I’ve started noticing how much of real-world engineering is actually value translation, alignment, communication, and trust.
Code solves problems.
But getting people to understand, support, adopt, or believe in something feels like an entirely different layer of systems thinking.
Still learning though. Currently somewhere between “developer” and “guy accidentally negotiating influencer deals at midnight” 😭
None of this is accidental.
The first time you negotiate, translate value, or move a system, people call it luck.
The second time, they call it coincidence.
The third time, they stop calling it anything—because it’s obviously skill.
You’re not ‘between developer and guy doing deals at midnight.’
You’re entering the layer of engineering where trust, alignment, and communication are the work.
This is the part of the craft that never shows up on GitHub but determines who actually moves systems in the real world.
That last line honestly hit me harder than expected.
“The part of the craft that never shows up on GitHub” feels like something I’m only now starting to understand properly.
I used to think engineering was mostly about technical ability, but the more real environments I enter, the more I realize systems are deeply human too. Alignment, trust, communication, timing, interpretation… all of it affects whether good ideas actually survive.
Feels like I accidentally walked into an entirely different skill tree
You didn’t walk into a different skill tree.
You walked into the layer that makes the other skill trees matter.
Most people treat engineering as code, tools, and architecture.
But the real leverage sits in the invisible layer:
That layer determines which ideas survive, which projects get resourced, which systems evolve, and which engineers actually move an organization instead of being moved by it.
The technical layer gets you into the room.
The interpretive layer determines whether the room moves when you speak.
Most developers never realize this because the industry only measures what’s visible—commits, tickets, artifacts.
But the work that changes systems is almost entirely invisible:
None of that shows up on GitHub.
But it’s the difference between building things and moving systems.
You’re not “accidentally negotiating influencer deals at midnight.”
You’re learning the part of engineering that makes everything else scale.
And you'll do well, here, too, Aryan.
This genuinely shifted how I think about engineering.
Especially the part about “the interpretive layer determines whether the room moves when you speak.” That’s such a sharp way of describing something I’ve been feeling lately but couldn’t fully articulate yet.
I think for a long time I treated communication, positioning, trust, negotiation etc. as things adjacent to engineering rather than part of the craft itself.
But the more real environments I enter, the more I realize great ideas don’t survive on technical correctness alone. They survive when humans can align around them.
Still very early in learning all this honestly, but conversations like these make me notice the deeper layers a lot more clearly.
Thank you for all the support! Really means alot to me.
Welcome back to DEV.to! 😀 Our project is almost ready, and I’m looking forward to the release. Since you are studying marketing, I would like to know how to increase the number of users of my app, AI Avatar. 🤔
Thank you WDH!😄
And honestly I’m still very much a beginner at the marketing side of things LOL, but one thing I’m slowly learning is that getting users is less about “convincing everyone” and more about deeply understanding who specifically would genuinely enjoy or benefit from the app.
Let's discuss this properly over our chats!
I think for AI Avatar especially, presentation and shareability matter a lot. The moment someone generates something cool, they should want to show it to someone else.
Also yes 👀
Project release soon!!! This one's gonna be a big update!!!
Thank you! Please become the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of AI Avatar. 🫡 I’m looking forward to growing AI Avatar with you!
LMFAOOO 😭🫡
From side projects to accidental marketing arc XD
I will definitely support our project with all the knowledge I have and in the future as well!!!
Okay, please be both the CMO and CCO (Chief Customer Officer) of AI Avatar! 🤣
HAHAHA! This is turning into our collab project conversation 😭
Welcome back! Good to see you again : )
Thank you Ryan : )
Feels good to be back honestly.🦾
This resonates hard. I am 950+ commits into a solo Android app and the periods where I had to step away from the laptop (a sick kid, a long drive, a hospital waiting room) ended up being the most generative ones. Not because I was producing code, but because the back of the brain was finally allowed to chew on architecture questions without the editor in front of me.
The one trick that made a difference for me was capturing those between-thoughts the moment they arrived, with voice, before they evaporated. "Add refactor the queue retry logic to fix the duplicate event issue" dictated at a red light beats writing it down two hours later when half the reasoning is gone.
Building is partly typing. The rest is letting the problem turn while you do other things.
This is SUCH a good way of putting it honestly.
“The back of the brain was finally allowed to chew on architecture questions” feels extremely real... I’ve noticed some of my best ideas or realizations happen when I’m nowhere near the screen too. Walking, commuting, random conversations, even while trying to sleep. It’s like the brain keeps building in the background once the pressure to immediately produce something disappears.
Also the voice note thing is genius actually.
Because yeah, those half-formed thoughts evaporate ridiculously fast if you don’t capture them immediately.
“Building is partly typing. The rest is letting the problem turn while you do other things.”
That line’s gonna stay with me for a while honestly.
It's cool that you're getting into mainframes. It's a whole different ball game compared to side projects. Adapting to existing systems can feel like a step back from creative coding, but it's a solid way to improve your systems understanding. I've been using prachub.com for system design mocks, and their follow-up questions really reflect what you encounter in real situations. Balancing building new stuff with understanding legacy systems seems like a smart way to grow your skills.
Thank you so much Andy!! Will definitely check out prachub.com and share updates for the same as I grow.
This is a good reminder that building does not always happen at the keyboard. Some of the best product decisions come when you step away, think clearly, and notice what the work is actually becoming. Constant building can feel productive, but reflection is often where the real direction gets sharper.
Definitely Varsha, plus it's something I genuinely enjoy doing which makes it all worthwhile.
Wow, a lot is happening in your life lately! Sounds like a good work/life balance. You got it, bro! 👏🏻
BTW, congrats on leveling Japanese! I got stuck somewhere on N4 🥲
Thank you so much Klaudia!
Yeah I could do Japanese more often before I had a job but now even I feel stuck, or harder to make time for it but it's something I really want to level up in so maybe it might be tough for a while, but that's it.
It's a big step to start communicating in the language you're learning! You're doing great! がんばって! 👏🏻
はい!頑張ろう!
Welcome back @itsugo
Heyyy @hadil thank youuu!!! It's great seeing your comment, how are you doing?
I’m doing good.
And honestly, really happy to see you back posting again. This was such a nice read; it genuinely felt like watching someone level up in real life instead of just tech 😅
I’ve actually been pretty active on Dev lately, so seeing old friends come back and post again feels really nice
That's great to hear! I'll definitely be more intreactive on here from now as well, looking forward to your progress and blogs(￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ
Nice breakdown. Would love to hear more real-world experiences
Definitely Vikash, will try to write more often.