My 2016 Year in Review

6 min readDec 31, 2016

Inspired by Una Kravets’s Year in Review, I decided to do a review of my own 2016. This has been a really fun activity to do, and has made me realise how far I have come this year!

Personal Projects

This year I worked on a lot of personal projects (really don’t know how I found the time!). I made 1,643 contributions to GitHub repositories.

Bots

KhaledBot: My first Slack bot, a bot that impersonates DJ Khaled in your Slack team.
Designer News Bot for Slack: Get Stories from Designer News Directly to Slack.
botsofcode: A Twitter bot for my blog, bitsofco.de.
Messenger Hunt: Delivers the best new products from Product Hunt to you in Facebook Messenger.

Open Source Tools

Gulp Email Workflow: A Gulp workflow for building HTML emails.
InlineTweet.js: Create tweetable links out of any text on a webpage.
CanIUse Embed: An embeddable widget that displays realtime data from caniuse.com.
CanIUse Embed Polymer: A Polymer component for the CanIUse embed.
Opera Detect: Better detection and analytics for Opera Browsers.

Web Applications

Tube Planr: This was the first offline-capable Progressive Web App I ever built, as a project for my Senior Web Developer Nanodegree.
Offline FX: A PWA FX converter.
app.bitsofco.de: A Progressive Web Application for my blog, bitsofco.de
Eat Drink Bot Admin Dashboard: This was the first project I ever worked on in Angular 2. It was the admin dashboard for the Eat Drink Lagos bot.
Muslims Condemn: Inspired by this tweet, my boyfriend and I created this site in under 24 hours. He built the API with Rails, and I designed the front-end and admin, wrote the markup and CSS, and built the Angular 2 application.
Blue Beanie Me: In support for Blue Beanie Day, I created this simple application using the Canvas API, that adds a blue beanie to a selfie you upload.

Writing

This was a great year for my main blog, bitsofco.de. I wrote 40 articles that gathered over 525,000 Page Views. My audience grew a a whole lot, 62.5% of people visiting where new, and my email list grew from 192 to 1,431 subscribers 😱!

These were my 10 most popular articles —

On bitsofcode I also started getting into video, and made 4 videos in total. Those videos have been watched for over 27,000 minutes by over 7,000 people. My most popular video, which was also my first video, was about How to Setup a Basic Service Worker.

I also started another blog, Hello Angular, on which I intended to write articles about Angular (2 and beyond). I haven’t dedicated nearly as much time to it as I would have liked, but managed to write 3 articles since starting in September. Unlike bitsofcode, I’m open to contributions on Hello Angular, so if you’re interested, send me an email.

Speaking

Before this year, I had only spoken at 1 conference ever. This year, I spoke at 12 conferences, both in Nigeria and internationally. Although I still get nervous before I give a talk, I feel like I’ve gotten a whole lot better at it over the past year.

Here are some of the talks I gave —

Tips & Tricks in Front-End Development (Slides)
Going “Offline First” (Slides)
Hosting with Firebase (Slides)
What about CSS? Progressive Enhancement & CSS (Slides)
Building Modern Progressive Web Apps (Slides)
Introduction to UI/UX Design (Slides)

Recognition

This was a bit of a crazy year for me. I got featured in Net Magazine’s Summer 2016 issue, answering the question, “How do you refactor code?”. I was also interviewed for a couple of publications, most notably For Creative Girls, and Digital Drift’s Podcast on Progressive Web Apps.

I also became a Google Expert in Web Technologies, the second in Nigeria, which has been a crazy/fun experience. Because of it I got to travel to Kenya to give a talk and to San Francisco to attend Chrome Dev Summit as well as the Google Experts Summit. I’ve also got to meet some amazing people along the way.

Life

I did a lot of travelling this year and visited 6 countries, 3 of them new— Kenya, The Netherlands, and Italy.

My Scratch-Off Map. Still a long way to go.

I started 2016 with a goal of reading 12 books, and failed at this spectacularly. I only managed to read (well technically, listen to) 4 books, and only 2 of them were notable — “The Secret Lives for Baba Segi’s Wives” and “Elon Musk: Inventing the Future”.

I turned 25! And had an epic birthday party to celebrate.

I also met Timi. I’m generally a private person, but I can’t write about my year without mentioning him, so prepare yourself for the 🧀. He’s the best thing that has happened to me this year and I look forward to spending many more with him.

Gadgets

Finally, gadgets. I acquired a lot this year, some of them gifts, some I bought for myself.

From top-left to bottom-right —

iPad Pro 9.7" and Apple Pencil
AuraVisor VR Headset and Controller
MacBook Pro 13" with Studio of Modé Skin
Google Home
iPhone 7
Apple Watch Sport Series 2
Bose QuietComfort 35 Wireless Headphones
Samsung Galaxy S7
Pebble Time Round

What about 2017?

I’m really excited for next year, I have a lot of great things planned. Here are some of my goals.

Personal Projects — I’d like to continue building at least as many things as I did this year, but I’d also like to explore different technologies. I’m pretty comfortable with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so I’d like to venture into something different next year.
Writing —I’d like to do more of both longer and shorter form writing. I feel like I have reached a place where my articles are always about the same length. Next year I’d like to dedicate more time to writing longer articles, but also like to be able to do shorter, bite-sized ones too.
Speaking — Next year I want to continue the speaking and do at least as many events as I did this year. A major goal for me is to become a more engaging and entertaining speaker. Now that I know I can deliver a talk competently, I need to figure out how to make my talks fun to watch.
Life — Travel more, way more!
Gadgets — USB-C ALL the Things!