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