I believe "year of the doge" is only for the reason that 2018 on the Lunar zodiac happens to be the year of the dog.  So that's where the correlation is coming from. As for development, I think there's someone working on the next version of the client software.  Don't see much other dev work being done.

However, doge remains a relatively stable coin with a number of followers, so I don't think it will disappear anytime soon.  I am not sure why you said you are losing hope, but hodling it is quite fine.  It also depends on what price you got it.  In any case, if you need the money and want to offload some of your coins, you can try to time the market and offload bit by bit when price surges.  It has dipped a few days before but has recovered a bit recently.

All the best.