2019 — We rise by lifting others.

In my 2018 year in review — the year it happened, I wrote:

And I know that for me to lift others, I have to be on top of my game so I can drag them up. So, I will do all my best to climb up the ladder so I can take others with me. So help me God.

One thing I have learnt this year is the power in building and creating communities that can enable young people learn, unlearn and relearn.

I did this with most of the communities I found myself and I would be sharing what I did in these communities.

WordPress

This year proved to be an insightful one for me and the Lagos WordPress Community.

We hosted a session for Women of WordPress at Social Media Week Lagos 2019. I spoke at WordCamp Lagos and hosted a couple of meetups for the community.

I also co-organized DoAction Lagos on the 20th of July, WordPress charity hackathon for the year and we built websites for 6 NGOs for free.

I was a project manager at DoAction Ijebu and I spoke at WordCamp Ife. I also spoke at two WordCamps outside the country — WordCamp Nairobi and WordCamp Mombasa.

Programming

I hosted HashCode 2019 at the University of Lagos and built some nice projects on Github — Different variant of the DP generator has been used more than 10000 times. I spent less time on my computer this year and more time on managing projects.

@maryabiodun01, @toydaboss, Carbon and I hosted another cohort of MushinCode.win where we introduce residents of Mushin to Web Development and Python.

Developer Student Club (Unilag)

I had my interview to be a DSC lead on the 3rd of June. I got my congratulatory email as a DSC Lead on August 6.

We held my first DSC meetup on August 30 and since then, we’ve hosted 34 events. We also introduced the girls at Queens College to HTML and CSS. Shout out to my team of heroes — @ifihan_, @Prof T., @mba_oma, @olamideaboyeji, Willy the designer, Irene Chan, @Abdullahi, Oseyemi and the numerous volunteers that give back to the community.

Meet and Greet with DSC Unilag Organizing Team

I attended the SSA Community Summit in Ghana from September 11 — September 15 and it proved to be the best time of my year meeting and networking with a smart leaders from diverse cultures.

DSC and WTM Leads at SSA Community Summit 2019

And, I was featured on my school’s website.

Google Developers Selects UNILAG Student as New Lead of Developer Students Club

We introduced about 80 people to Open Source during Hacktoberfest Unilag on the 11th of October.

We also hosted the Flutterwave Student Hackathon at the University of Lagos

Code Legion

Earlier in the year, I and my guys from Systems Engineering, Unilag started CodeLegion.com.ng, an avenue to teach kids how to code. And we had a cohort in partnership with Hoares Memorial Methodist Cathedral, Yaba.

We were able to teach kids Web Development and Programming in Python for a period of 6 weeks. Amazing students! I was also a part of the faculty that trained kids at Cyber Camp.

Engineering Career Expo

In 2018, Mayowa reached out to me and asked me to join him in training the students of Engineering at the University of Lagos with technical skills and soft skills that is needed to thrive in the workspace.

I served as the Head of IT and Administration and it was basically my work to ensure that we have tutors that will teach the classes, curate the experience and issue certificates. We had the Grand Finale on the 17th of August. See pictures.

DevFest

I attended my first DevFest outside Lagos this year — Accra, Ibadan and Ilorin. I also attended DevFest Lagos and Ikorodu.

I gave the opening keynote at DevFest Ilorin.

DevFest Ilorin

Key Takeaways From The Year

I’m adding this just because Debo asked me to. Lessons from the year unpacked

1. TELL YOUR STORY. A lot of people do great things that no one hear about.
2. Community is everything. Why go alone when you can go with others.
3. What is worth doing is worth doing well. Over the cause of the year, I had to overlook the selfish interest of team members on some projects and do their tasks + mine. And I did better in school because of this principle.
4. Life does not revolve around me. You can’t have everything
5. People really want to help. Give people the chance to impress you. Delegate task. I am a master at delegating tasks to people and most of the success we achieved at DSC Unilag for the year is because of delegating to my heroes that do awesome work.
6. The world does not start and end in Nigeria. Be a global citizen and relate with people from other cultures.
7. Save responsibly. Use PiggyVest. I was able to get Nifemi (my new laptop) because I saved for it.
8. Create processes for your teams. The reason why it looks like I never do anything other than joke about is because there are processes and checklists for most things I have to do.
9. When travelling, take your pepper with you. I suffered without pepper in East Africa. How do you eat Ugalli without soup. How 😢 😢
10. Nigeria Jollof is better than Ghana jollof or Pilau or Biryani.

After visiting 10 states in Nigeria and 5 countries — Ghana, Togo, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, my biggest lesson so far has been: “Everything you want is on the other side of taking action”.

It’s really been a great year. I would be reflecting on the successes and failures and then we toss the coin next year.

If you read this far, clap for the review and follow me on @geektutor.

Next year, we toss the coin.