2024 wasn’t great for me, but in the last few months, I started seeing some results of my hard work.
In Q1 2025, I was randomly scrolling through Twitter when I met @serafimcloud, the founder of @21st_dev. I messaged him and we had a chat. I made my move and asked if there was any opportunity for me at 21st. He mentioned the ambassador programme and I agreed to be a brand ambassador. In return, I had to publish 20 components every month for 21st and they’d promote my work with some compensation.
I was thrilled because it was my first time earning properly and not just random gigs.
I had that contract for six months but later cancelled it due to some personal reasons.
I used the money to buy a new laptop since my old one was broken and not working well.
For the first time in my life, with my own earnings, I bought a MacBook M4 Max. I was so happy and my parents were incredibly proud, especially my mum. (Love you, mum!)
Later, I also bought a phone with the same earnings.
After my 21st contract, I started working as a designer and designer engineer, mostly as a freelancer with small gigs. A few days later, I opened my own design agency and went full-time. I finished more than four projects in three months and earned the trust of amazing founders.
One day, the CTO of @Cloudflare DM’d me and asked if I wanted to work there! I couldn’t believe it was real. Unfortunately, I had to decline the offer due to medical problems.
Just a day later, the CEO of @vercel DM’d me and asked if I wanted to work at Vercel, Canon Events. I was so happy he helped me get on a call with John Phamous, but I missed the meeting because I had an emergency to the hospital. (I told him about it, but I never got a reply.)
I also got an offer from @elevenlabsio. I had pre-interviewed and interviewed but failed because I didn’t know how to design algorithms and implement data structures.
I’m sorry, that’s unfortunate.
I applied to some of my favourite companies and startups like Vercel, Raycast, Mintlify, and so on.
Although I was rejected from all of them, that didn’t deter me. While working, I also posted my work on Twitter, which led to founders from Twitter contacting me and booking design partner slots. This worked really well, and one founder even booked a slot for 2026 (bhai @dudufolio).
One of my open-source projects, @Ikiform, was selected for Vercel's open-source program. This was a really big achievement for me!
Everything was going well until a few months later when I contacted @DynoDiscord Bot’s founder Brian Tanner, also known as Nooblance. We had a meeting and he hired me as a design engineer to work on different project.
Now, I’m working with Brian as a design engineer to shape the future of Discord bots.
That concludes 2025.

$ whoami

$ ls writing/

My 2025 Wrapped

$ cat experience.log

@SolcardasDesign Engineer

@21st.devasBrand Ambassador

@InboundasDesign Engineer

$ ls projects/

Staxk

HextaUI

Ikiform