2020

In my 2019 Year in Review, I wrote:

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 :)

I had a lot of plans for this year which, for obvious reasons, didn’t entirely get fulfilled. I was planning for 2020 to be a “gap year”, where I would travel to different places, try new things, and just generally live my best life.

Luckily for me, I was able to celebrate my 29th birthday with some friends in Barbados just before everything hit the fan. It was definitely one of the best celebrations I’ve ever had, and I’m so grateful I was able to have a fun break before everything closed up!

Koromone Koroye , Tolu, Reformed, Daniel Orubo, Timi Ajiboye, F.Merry

But then, the pandemic…

As like with everyone else, my plans got cut short, and so I ended up going to the UK to quarantine for what I thought would just be a couple of months. And well, I’m still here 😂.

Going through lockdown was (and still is) strange. Like so many others, at first I was optimistic about “all the things I’d be able to get done”. I had a whole list of things/skills/tasks I wanted to achieve which, for the most part, I didn’t.

Then the monotony started to hit. Even as a person that finds comfort in routine, I found that the sameness of everything did get to me and I started to completely lose all sense of time.

… and not just the pandemic

Funnily enough, when I think of the most impactful or stressful days of this year, the pandemic probably wouldn’t make the top 3. For whatever reason, so many other year-defining things happened, I almost started to believe there is some curse to 2020.

The number 1 was definitely the weeks of the #EndSARS protests and, specifically, October 20th, the day of the Lekki Massacre. A lot of people describe that day as breaking them, and I would agree. Before then, I had a different (and now I think naïve), idea of what country I lived in. Now, my eyes are open.

That said, there were some positives that came out of the movement. So many people stepped up in a way that nobody would have imagined. It really showed me what we as Nigerians can achieve, despite what people (including ourselves) may think. And this brings me to the first category in this review, my work with the Feminist Coalition.

Feminist Coalition 💛

This year, I joined 12 other amazing women to become founding members of the Feminist Coalition. We started off in July, and for several months did a lot of planning around exactly what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted to achieve it. But on October 9th, all that basically went out the window when we decided to get involved in supporting the #EndSARS movement. We wrote all about what that process was like in a recent article, In Our Own Words, which I’d encourage you to read.

The weeks we spent actively being involved in the protests and the months after have honestly been a life-changing experience for me. I learned a whole lot about myself, but there are 2 lessons in particular I’d like to highlight:

1. The power and importance of collaboration. I’ve always been a person that prefers to work alone, and joining forces with other people isn’t something that comes naturally to me. So, joining this coalition was a leap, and I’m so glad that I did because I don’t think any one of us could have achieved what we did alone.
2. The downsides of being really known. I’ve been a relatively prominent member of the tech community for a while, so I didn’t think being in the public eye for this would be all that different. But it turns out, it was very different. When a lot of people know “of” you, your humanity tends to get lost. People are so comfortable spewing insults at people they think are “out of reach”, and for the first time this year I got a lot of that. But what I learned, and am still learning, is how to handle this sort of attention because it’s only going to grow.

BuyCoins 💜

I’m extremely grateful that, for us at BuyCoins, the pandemic didn’t have such a significantly detrimental effect on our business. As a tech company, we were able to switch to fully remote work fairly easily, and I’d say we’ve even benefitted from it by being able to hire people outside our base of Lagos.

This time last year, we were a team of 9 people, including myself, Reformed, and Timi Ajiboye. Now, we’re 22 people, over half of which I’ve never even met in person! It’s been incredible (and honestly scary) to watch the team grow so much. I’m really proud of all the the things we’ve been able to achieve amidst the craziness of the year. We launched both Sendcash and Getcards this same year, as well as made large updates to our core exchange. I know next year will be even more incredible (and definitely scary), but I look forward to seeing what BuyCoins looks like at the end of next year.

Speaking 🎤

This year, I only gave one talk in-person, which was at a conference I organise for frontend developers in Lagos at the beginning of the year. Nonetheless, I was able to speak at 8 other online events throughout the year, even more than I did last year!

My favourite had to be speaking at An Event Apart Front-End Focus, which is a conference I’ve wanted to speak at (or even just attend) for a long time. My talk, Future-Proof CSS is probably the most effort I’ve ever put into a presentation (and I hope it showed!).

I also enjoyed doing a short, TED-style, talk on how BuyCoins is powering the future of money in Africa.

Features & Accomplishments 🥳

• I completed the HBS Online Credential of Readiness programme (with Honors). This is a 150-hour certificate program on the fundamentals of business and although it was very different to what I usually do, I found it really interesting and will definitely like to do more in this area.
• I did a 3rd round of my scholarship for Nigerian women. With the help of some additional sponsors, we were able to support 15 women to complete a Udacity Nanodegree (12 of which finished) and 10 women to complete a course on Educative (6 of which finished).
• I continued with my Portuguese learning both on Duolingo and in-person. And although I had to take a (still ongoing) break from it since October, I was still able to make a lot of progress with the language.
• I (alongside my Feminist Coalition colleagues) was featured in ELLE in an article on How Women Powered Nigeria’s #ENDSARS Movement.
• The Coalition as a whole was recognised by several organisations, my personal favourite being on Beyonce’s website .

Writing ✍🏾

This year was definitely my worst with writing. I only wrote 2 articles on my blog, bitsofcode. One was about What I wish I knew about React after properly delving into it for the first time, and the other was on my personal Highlights from Chrome Dev Summit 2020.

Outside of my blog, I wrote about how I didn’t learn much new about coding this year on CSS Tricks. And, recently, I wrote about how to do dollar cost averaging with Bitcoin on the BuyCoins Blog.

Reading 📚

This year, surprisingly, I managed to exceed my goal of 12 books and read 15 books! My favourite ones (in the order in which I read them) were:

• The Libertarian Mind (David Boaz), because it for the first time made me think about different political ideologies. While I don’t consider myself a Libertarian, this book did make a pretty good case for it and thus forced me to articulate why I believe otherwise.
• Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari), because it made me look at the world and customs we take for granted and think about why they came to be.
• Factfulness (Hans Rosling), because it was another assumption-questioning book.
• The Moment of Lift (Melinda Gates), because it was incredibly inspiring and surprisingly relatable.
• Regretting Motherhood (Orna Donath), because motherhood is one of those things no one ever talks about with much honesty and this book changed that.
• Zikora (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), because I can talk about the themes it raises for daysss.

What about 2021?

Even though we’re all looking forward to 2020 being over, we also know that nothing drastically different is going to happen on January 1st. I’ll likely still be under lockdown with no concrete end in sight. So my goal for next year is really just to take care of myself and do the best in whatever conditions I am. See you next year!