2019
2018 was an incredibly busy year filled with a lot of pretty big “firsts”. 2019, on the other hand, has been more a year of consolidation and doing a bit better than last year in most aspects of my life. All in all, I think it’s been a good end to the decade :)
BuyCoins 💜
2019 was an interesting year for me at BuyCoins because it was the first full year where we operated as a “real company”. Before going through YC last summer, BuyCoins (then Bitkoin Africa) was just a side project I worked on with Timi Ajiboye as a fun thing to do outside my day job at eyeo. After YC and fundraising, we had to come back to Nigeria and build a real company with a real office, real employees, and real responsibilities. Because of this, I had to go through a lot of things for the first time — hiring people, firing people, being a manager, filing taxes, the list goes on and on.
Going through all this definitely came with its challenges, especially because there isn’t anything you can really do to prepare for a role like this, you just have to learn and grow on the job. But it’s been a predominantly positive experience, largely due to my cofounders Reformed and Timi Ajiboye, plus the amazing team of employees we’ve been lucky enough to have join us on this journey — Zino, Olaolu, Linda, Teju, Mayowa & Tolu.
Speaking 🎤
This year I presented at 4 conferences:
- At WTM Agadir, I spoke about My Tech Journey and lessons I learned along the way
- At JAMstack Conf in San Francisco, I gave a lightning talk about Headless Chrome & Cloudinary for Progressive Enhancement
- At the Google Experts Summit in Sunnyvale, I gave another lightning talk about How to support underrepresented groups in the technology industry
- At dotCSS Paris, I spoke about CSS best practices in my talk, Writing CSS in 100 Years
I’m a bit disappointed that I was only able to speak 4 times, mainly because I was booked for 3 more conferences and had to cancel because of various visa issues. On the plus side, I think the talks I did give were some of the best quality talks I have delivered. My goal for this year was to focus more on quality, which I think I did, but at the same time it’s only through practice that I can really improve.
I also organised the third annual Frontstack event all about Writing Modern CSS, a favourite topic of mine.
Writing ✍🏾
This year I wrote 13 articles, roughly one every month. This includes a guest post I did for CSS Tricks on what had me interested about building websites in 2019. My answer was JAMstack, Project Fugu, and Houdini.
My favourite article I wrote this year is definitely my most recent one about how I created “live images” of each caniuse feature’s support data. It was also one of the most viewed and shared. Other popular articles were:
- What is tree shaking and how does it work?
- Removing duplicate objects from an Array (is hard)
- Your first performance budget with Lighthouse
I also branched out this year and wrote about topics other than frontend web development. Writing has always been the best way for me to learn and consolidate my knowledge, so it was a nice challenge for me to write about what I learned as I was doing my Blockchain Nanodegree.
Side Projects 🛠
It’s always exciting for me working on side projects, mainly because there are no constraints or limitations other than what I decide. There were two projects that I particularly enjoyed working on this year.
Easy is a meditation application I built after reading the book Bliss More. I wanted a meditation app that was based on what was outlined in the book, and none existed that I liked so I decided to make one myself.
My CanIUse embed is a side project I created in 2016, an embeddable widget that displays realtime data from caniuse.com. Over the years, I have made various improvements to it and this year I made a lot of significant updates, which I wrote and spoke about. It was nice to focus on making an existing thing better rather than always starting a brand new project.
Features and Accomplishments 📰
- I was interviewed by the BBC for a programme about women teaching themselves how to code
- I was featured in TechCabal’s Tech Women Lagos exhibition
- Udacity’s blog wrote a story about my scholarship program for Nigerian women
- I completed my second Udacity Nanodegree on Blockchain Development. It was definitely difficult to learn something so different than what I usually work on, but it was really rewarding and I’m particularly proud that I was able to complete it in exactly 2 months!
- I (just yesterday) got a 100-day streak learning Portuguese on Duolingo! I’ve always thought of myself as bad with languages, so this has been a big deal for me. Having friends on the app has helped a lot with motivation, so feel free to add me if you’re also on it :)
Travel 🇵🇹🇲🇦🇦🇪🇫🇷🇺🇸🇬🇧
In 2019, I travelled to 6 countries, 2 of them new (UAE and Morocco).
This year I also, for the first time, planned solo trips for no other purpose than a holiday. Previously, I always travelled for conferences or some other work-related event. But this year, I discovered travel just for the fun of it. I even did a solo road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles and made a video about it.
Reading 📚
For the past few years, I’ve been trying to read 12 books within a year and I’ve always failed. This year, I’m really happy to be able to say that I surpassed my goal!
In total, I read 16 books. My favourite ones (in the order in which I read them) were:
- My Sister, The Serial Killer, because I loved how easy it was to read and it was really refreshing to read this type of story with Nigerian characters
- I Think, Therefore I Draw, because I like reading about philosophy and it was an engaging (and entertaining) way to consume an otherwise difficult topic
- Watchmen, because it’s the best superhero story ever told
- Bliss More, because it taught me how to meditate
- Outgrowing God, for so many reasons that I may have to write about separately
Health & Fitness 🤸🏾♂️
Last year I developed a habit of (almost) daily exercise which I kept to this year.
I also ran my first and second 10k races ever this year. I was by no means close to winning, but I at least crossed the finished line in a reasonable time.
What about 2020?
Next year is going to be a significant year for me for a lot of different reasons. I’m looking forward to writing my 2020 year in review :)
