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2019 - The Review
Such a huge year with opportunity to prove myself as a software developer. Plenty goals, few were crushed and others I failed at. Plenty learning and lessons, plenty positives to take to the new year and focus on the thing I said was going to do during my last year review and evaluation of my journey.I enjoyed every bit of it and I am excited about what the future holds in faith now.
One goal was to write code and get to build products(software) useful and usable. Put all the learning over the year into practice. All the effort of the past years and learning put them together and use more. This is my third year of coding fully as a professional and my fifth year of involvement in Tech. I am very pleased and happy to be able to share my learning with the hope to help me👦🏼 become better each new day.
📷 photo credit Dan Mayor
I met a lot of awesome folks this year ranging from day to day co-workers to community leaders and mentors. Learnt that your net-worth is a true reflection of your network. Ama - Star girl👩🏼🎤🌟, Dike, Richard, Ibrahim, MZ, Kenny became my all day pals at work. Non technical friends like my Boss, Sewa, Jenny, Passion Incubators People, Leadspace friends - Nonye, kelvin and Lateefat, My HubOne Pals, ScholarX team - Nonso and Funmilola - Cake Vendor and MyCrib Team and special mention to the hardworking Theo who get us sorted at all time. Kudos to Babajide and the FCMB team for the great community full of impact most especially the world class idea of Epic hours.
Fake Natterbase Intern
My Intern - Ayokanmi Dammy’s progress is glowing, mastering the art of frontend engineering during her compulsory 6 month internship under my watch. We were privilleged to work on some project’s together. You did so well my sister from another mother. Keep the progress. Don’t despise the days of little beginning. Your progress map is amazing.
Spoke At The First JAMstack Meetup In Lagos
Meet with someone I so much admire in the Nigerian Tech Space, the one and only 🔥minister, the God of @unicodeveloper, the Chief himself - Prosper Otemuyiwa at the 1st edition of the JAMStack meetup organized by Williams Imoh and Gift Egwuenu. He was impressed with my presentation during the meetup and we did some PHP dev bashing. Trust me none can say anything not too cool against PHP where Prosper is - I was on the receiving end. He was so much fun and I hope I get to know him better. He is doing so much work o the community with for loop Africa and his new company ouredenlife
📷 photo credit https://twitter.com/jola_adebayor
Joined Natterbase
Such a wonderful story December 2018 as I resigned from my then current engagement in Ibadan after a massive training project in òwò, ondo state, Nigeria where young secondary school student were taught how to code from scratch via a support initiate that my then employer (Mayokun) were charged with the resposibility to handle. I was not sure of where I would be working next but I waited and prepared. Rufus Oyemade did a tweet shoutout for me and boom I got an offer to resume January.
A friend, @setemiojo is relocating to Lagos in the new year & looking for opportunities to work & grow as a JavaScript developer (front-end or back-end).
— Rufus Oyemade (@Oluwarufus) December 28, 2018
He has done some amazing stuff, have a look at his CV here: https://t.co/zfnZv0vn98
A recommendation or RT would be great.
Relocating to Lagos
From the tweet that happened 28th December to resuming 8th January, 2019. The Journey down to lagos packing and getting a prime opportunity to reunite with my big sister in her place in Lagos pending when I was okay to move to my own apartment. Move to lagos in the early part of the year and started living with my big sister. I ❤️ Travelling and travelled a lot during the year especially to Ibadan and Osogbo. Went to Abuja fewer times compared to last year. Attended some of my friends wedding ceremony as well.Met with Faith Dike from this tweet.
Failures
I was sloppy at times this year yet I knew I just wanted an atmosphere to learn. I failed a lot of times. Just wanting everthing to go smoothly as planned using Todo List and Routines. Did not want to take up fixing legacy codebase with unrealistic timeline and pressure which was very important to my company due to certain reasons. Fixing buggy codebase with poor understanding of the project is an unrealistic effort when I first joined my new team but I had to man up and face the fear at certain points. I failed at starting a podcast.I failed an Andela interview at the 3rd stage. Plenty rejections from Call for papers to speak at conferences and workshop. Personal development dragged, wrote less react code, struggled with writing automated tests, CI and CD setup and Nodejs design patterns.
Evolution
The year saw a lot of revolution in the tech space both local and international. Largest tech conference happened in Nigeria and Kenya via concatenate conf and I attended the last day and missed out on the workshops.
I saw myself at different level during my time at natterbase. I want to improve and be the best I can ever be as a JavaScript developer. I want to work on more larger codebase and with good agency with good engineering structure and more projects and better project managers.
I love graphQL and hope to start the Lagos meetup for graphQL soon. I convinced my team to try it out for a project and I will write about our experience and what we learnt. I love everything that has to do with netlify, Apollo, Codesandbox, Paypal and one day hope I will work with one of these company. Andela is another dream place I hope to work. After Ibrahim joined and he told me about all the wonderful structures in their setup and system put in place to make developers productive.
I hope to write more TypeScript all year in 2020. Get to learn and master
another programming language. Thinking ELixir or Erlang. I must be better with
C# and Java with the plenty🧘🏼♂️ I know.
The goal for next year is to build ton of product like Sara Vieira conference talk on building shit ton of project and ideas. Do more open contribution. Really do not know what to expect but I am sure I will give every thing I have within me to become better than I was in 2019. Another thing to focus on is building progression with my routine (finding consistency and good habit formation). Speak to my mentors and write more.
The book I read in 2019
Could not read as I would have loved since normal day to day work was very choking and I was just learning to manage day to day work as a software development.
- Atomic Habits
- Live Love Learn
- The Nigerian Revolution and Biafran War
- Modern Web Development with JAMstack
- Why Nations Fail
- Learning GraphQL - Eve Porcello & Alex Banks
Podcast I listened to
my pocket(app for listening to podcast) screenshot
From the last year review podcasting is my thing. I love listening to them on commute to and from work, when doing house chores, any opportunity that would not so require my full attention was dedicated to listening to podcast majorly Tech related. One faith based podcast I love listening to is Ask Pastor John Piper - ASK PJ and Quote of the day by Sean Croxton for motivation.
- Syntax fm co-hosted by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski
- Freecodecamp Podcast by the freecodecamp community
- Akimbo by Seth Godin
- Ask Pastor John by Pastor John Piper
- Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott
- The TIM Ferriss show by Tim Ferriss
- Full Stack Radio by Adam Wathan
- React Podcast by Chantastic
- Quote of the Day by Sean Croxton
Desire to work remotely
The hustling and bustling of lagos has made me to desire to work remotely. I believe I could do better with my time management if I get an opportunity to avoid commuting. It requires lot discipline and focus. The Cost here in Nigeria is hgh considering that you will be paying for data and electricity yourself and be the one to manage power outage with either an inverter or a generating set. Went to stay with one of my Aunties - Mummy Jasmine and her place offered me lot of comfort to work remotely which I tried a couple of times. The battery of my laptop cannot go long hours but I managed to get a brand new MacBook Pro 2019 Corei5 1.4ghz towards the end of the year. It was huge but I hope it will spur my career trajectory forward.
Teaching and the developer advocate in me
Somehow I am asking a lot of questions about what I want, my just cause or purpose in all this coding and working. I have strong desires to live to the maximum of my God given potentials and abilities with hard work and consistency. But I stumble when I try to come to resolve of what I want from my own life. I took some weeks off towards the end of the year away from people to just thinking about the outlook I want my life to have. Coming to a resolve that I want to teach more JavaScript related and bring to public the part of me that like to explain thing to other developers, the part of me that jump on exciting technology and teach it to new engineering team to make their live and work more easy. The part of me that writes too - the kind of article I search for to find on the internet. I hope 2020 will be me doing more of teaching and advocating.
The plan for 2020
Silently all over this blog post I written and talked about all the thing I hope to focus on this new year.
Year in pictures
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Written by Oluwasetemi Ojo Stephen {...OOS}, A FullStack Developer (Reactjs, Nodejs, Typescript), currently lives in Osogbo, Osun State Nigeria with my lovely and priceless Wife Temidayo .🎈
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