*Had this article in drafts since the end of last year decided to publish*
This year I embarked on a pretty daunting journey, armed with motivation, a plethora of web development courses, uncertainty and maybe excitement. I talk in some detail about my web development journey in my first three posts.
This review doubles as a reminder of just how far I have come in such a short time and as a forecast of sorts for what is to come. Reviewing the year in three sections:
Tech
In a couple of months, I went from utter noob to interviewing at some of Nigeria’s biggest firms, I learned a shit ton of cool tech, built fun projects and broke a few things in the process. Learning to code requires more than just motivation — creating routines, discipline and a sprinkling of good habits take the baton where motivation stops.
It took a random tweet to get me to really take stock of all of the work I put in this year — I did the damn work and I’m proud of myself. For a bit of context, I have struggled with consistency all my life, so going from that to spending an entire year holed up in my room hunched over my computer is quite the feat. It also helped that I’m naturally curious and writing code just makes me so happy *for now* haha.
In the coming year I plan to learn a new programming language, design and maybe some crypto or AR/VR.
HireJuniors
In a bid to master my skills by building more real world things and inspired by my frustrations with landing a decent junior dev role in Lagos, I started hireJuniors. It is a platform aimed at curating the best decent junior friendly jobs and resources for junior developers. I learned some backend programming (Node, Mongo and Express) to build this web application and I’m building the frontend with React. The code for this project can be found here.
I hope to do a lot more for Nigeria’s fledgling developer scene in my capacity next year, I have received some help and advice and I hope to pay all of that forward.
Life
So switching careers and doing what I did came at some cost (health, social and mental). I won’t dwell too much on the “costs” because there’s nothing to be gained from that, but I admit it will take some time and thought to get things back to near normal.
I managed to meet a few amazing people in Q4 *thank you internet*. I dished out and experienced truly terrible behavior, learned the importance of forming good connections with people and tried some cool new things.
I had goals entering the year but save for the tech ones I failed at most of them — didn’t read as many books as I’d hoped to, lost even more weight, lost some good friendships, failed to land my dream tech job, zero new destination but we try again next year so help me God.
In 2020 we’re exploring new interests, meeting people, trying to find happiness and making some ego too *shout hallelujah somebody!*
