My First Week on DEV — Badges, Game Jams, and Way More Than I Expected

I joined DEV at the start of January, but it's only really been in the past week or so that things clicked into place — and looking back, it's been a lot more eventful than I expected for "week one."

What I Set Out to Do

My original plan was simple: write a structured series covering iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, one topic at a time, with anime examples thrown in to keep things fun. Strings, arrays, loops, functions — the building blocks.

What I didn't plan for was everything else that happened alongside it.

The June Solstice Game Jam Happened

I saw the announcement for DEV's June Solstice Game Jam and, on a whim, decided to build something for it. A few hours later I had a fully working SwiftUI trivia game — Pride Trivia & Alan Turing Edition — with ten questions covering LGBTQIA+ history and Alan Turing's legacy, a rainbow progress bar, and a results screen with score-based messages.

I'd never built and shipped something end-to-end like that before, let alone submitted it to a community challenge. Going from "let's see if this works in the simulator" to "this is live on GitHub with a demo video and a published writeup" in one sitting was honestly a bit of a blur.

Then I Detoured Into Google AI Studio

A few days later, I worked through the DEV Education Track for Google AI Studio and built MascotCraft Studio — an app that generates coding mascots using Gemini and Imagen. One prompt later, I had a fully deployed web app and a mascot named Octo-Byte, a cheerful deep-sea developer with eight arms and a talent for multitasking.

That post sparked one of my favorite discussions so far — a few comments turned into a genuinely interesting conversation about how AI is shifting the bottleneck from "can I build this" to "what should I build, and how do I know if it's good." Not at all what I expected from a post about a cartoon octopus.

The Badges

Somewhere in all of this, I picked up:

• A 1 Week Community Wellness Streak badge, just from commenting on other people's posts
• A Cloud Run badge, from the Octo-Byte post
• And I'm hopeful for the Google AI Studio Builder badge once that gets reviewed

None of these were the goal going in — they were just a nice side effect of actually engaging with the community instead of only posting and disappearing.

What Surprised Me Most

Honestly, the comments. I expected writing tutorials to be a one-way thing — write, publish, move on. Instead I've had genuinely thoughtful replies, people sharing their own backgrounds and asking for specific topics (shoutout to the reader who requested a Swift Package Manager post — it's on the list!), and even a regular commenter who's become a small, friendly fixture in my replies.

It's made the whole thing feel less like "publishing content" and more like an actual conversation that happens to be in public.

What's Next

Back to the Swift series for now — functions are done, and there's plenty more to cover. I'm also planning to start learning Python on the side, 30 minutes a day, which might end up being its own thread of posts depending on how it goes.

If you're new here too and wondering whether it's worth commenting on other people's posts before you've published anything yourself — based on this week, I'd say: yes, absolutely. 🌸