2019: Unexpected turns. Still loving it 😍
Hey guys, it’s that time of the year where I tell you how the year went for me. In my last year’s review, I was pretty optimistic about 2019 and I thought I had it all figured out but boy was I in for a surprise 😆
Exit myPadi.ng 😢
Well most often than not, things don’t usually go as we plan. I exited myPadi.ng in February 2019. It was really one hell of a ride. I’d love every moment. As my first official tech role, I had a lot of experience of working as a professional software developer. Got to face first hand the cold hand of meeting the corporate deadlines, screaming bosses and whatnot. In a word, it was an EXPERIENCE
Auctionlance Platform
While I was still reminiscing about my previous job and what I really need to do going forward, The CEO of Auctionlance Platform who happens to be an old course mate of mine set up a meet in Agbor, Delta State to ask if I could solely build the Auctionlance Platform as a consultant. Well, I was out of a job and I really like the project and hey I’d be working with Blockchain technology and Nuxt.js, so what could go wrong 😏?
Relocation
Well, life happens, and really really fast I must interject. Rent was getting closer to be renewed for the year 2019 😅, I had to make a tough call. Renew the rent and be in Ozoro or relocate somewhere else. Well being with myPadi was a major reason why I was in Ozoro in the first place. So where could it be? Port Harcourt, Lagos, Abuja? 🤔. Realistically I couldn’t afford that especially with my kid bro with me(schooling and all). So what to do…
An Afterthought
While still in the dilemma of to stay or not to stay at Ozoro, I recalled I loved it at Agbor when I had the meeting to discuss Auctionalance — love the church, the fact they have a lot of fruits and it was generally a better city in my opinion that Ozoro. So I talked with my employer and he loved the idea(who wouldn’t? The person building your dream child will be at arms length 😃). So it was settled then, Promise(my kid bro) hasn’t resumed school yet(and he wouldn’t for quite a while), Blessing’s birthday was approaching so we decided to throw a little private party for her special day before we exit Ozoro.
Agbor
So I made the move! decided to have a clean start. Get an apartment and enrol Promise in a new school. But the reality was I had to wait for almost 5 months to do that. We lived with Henry(CEO Auctionlance Platform), who was a boss, a friend and a brother(he still is). It was a character building experience.
When are we launching Kelvin?
The above was the frequent question being asked by Henry about the ongoing project. It turned out I underestimated the project and it was taking too long and we are not meeting deadlines for our stakeholders. Needless to say, it was “bad bad”.
After a couple of months of building the platform using traditional client-server architecture with a backend in SailsJS/NodeJS, we decided to utilize the full power of Waves Blockchain and build a full dApp as our backend. Turned out that was way more effective for our use case and it took quite a shorter time to build like a fragment of the time spent building the old system(which we completely abandoned). Pst: I had help 😃
Waves Africa and Open Source
While still working on Auctionlance, Henry realized that there wasn’t a thriving community for the Waves Blockchain in Africa and he founded Waves Africa and also made me the Lead Developer. Under his leadership, I built:
- A web service to get Waves price in African currencies (we support 7 African currencies currently)
- A telegram bot that consumes the above service to display waves price for our community(find it here)
- A VS Code extension snippet for the Waves RIDE Smart Contract Programming Language. Check it out here
NuxtJS Africa — Africans are Nuxt.js
In August 2019, I decided to create a community to foster the use of Vue.js and Nuxt.js technologies. I for one think both technologies are awesome and if adopted would make the lives of front-end developers awesome. And no we haven’t held any meetups so far but we have conducted 2 tweet chats where we profiled Abdelrahman Awad(creator of Vee Validate) and Jonathan Bakebwa(Front-end developer at Akkadu and creator of Breadstick)— two awesome developers.
#WavesLagos2019
And yes, Lucky Henry and I became Waves Platform ambassadors. We held a meetup at Lagos to talk about Waves RIDE(Smart contract programming language of the Waves Platform) and it was awesome. Thanks to the Waves Platform team for such a wonderful platform.
Skills Learnt and Achievements 😸
- Wrote 15+ articles on medium.
- Learnt iOS development with Swift 😙.
- Had 2 certifications on testing at TestAutomationU.
- Learnt Waves Platform RIDE smart contract language and wrote 3 dApps as of the time of this writing.
- Finally got a Mac laptop and wonder why I didn’t for a long time.
- Read and completed more tech books 😃.
- Begun writing extensions for VS Code.
- Started building apps on the JAMStack powered by Nuxt.js and Netlify.
Key Takeaways from 2019
So 2019 taught me how to be patient and to really follow a course until fruition. And yes I am still with Blessing(the love of my life) who continuously makes me love her more daily 😍 — Thanks angel for being the best.
2020?
I am not going to make the same mistake twice and predict in 2020. Instead, I’d say I would follow hard after the course as it unravels.
With this, I say, a happy Christmas to everyone with a prosperous 2020 ahead. Make sure to be the best version of you.
Happy deploying 🚀 🚀 🚀
