2019: A year in review
It’s the last day of 2019 and I’m amazed at how quickly the year went by. I wrote blog posts in 2018 and in 2017 to summarise my career journey and passion projects and I’ve decided to do it again to reflect on the year.
Witty Careers
I’m the founder of a community called Witty Careers that helps women start jobs in the UK Tech sector. In 2018, we launched our community and ran engaging, well attended workshops. For 2019, my plan was to focus on fostering community. With the help of our team, volunteers and partners we have achieved four initiatives in 2019. Here are the highlights.
March 2019: A community social and afternoon of Tech Talks. Check out the Tech Talk videos here:
May 2019: A school programme for Year 9–11 of Eastside Young Leaders Academy.
November 2019: A Career Clinic in partnership with Deliveroo at Work Life London. Read our Community blog by Nelly here:
December 2019: A women in Tech evening at Microsoft Store. Check out our wrap up blog on what we got up to during the evening:
Achievements and Recognition
This year I was pleasantly surprised with the recognition, nominations and invitations I received. So grateful and humbled for the work I do in the industry to be recognized on a national and global level
Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe: Technology
Points of Light Award from 10 Downing Street and a letter from Theresa May
Nesta’s 12 Women shaping AI feature
Guest on the Future Curious Podcast’s Who has a seat at the Innovation table episode
The 50 most inspiring, prominent, and influential black voices in UK tech
TechRound 29 under 29 entrepreneurs
A judge of #TechWomen100 awards
My day job
This year I got to retire my old job title(Technical Evangelist) and I am now a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. My job responsibilities are the same, the only change is that I don’t need to explain what my job title means to people as much :) It’s surprising how many people in Tech didn’t know roles in Developer Evangelism existed.
I really enjoy my job at Microsoft because I work on things I love and I also get to do me!
I get the opportunity to work on really cool projects with software companies in our partner ecosystem. Check out this blog I wrote about work with one of our partners https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/industry-blog/en-gb/financial-services/2019/12/17/ai-customer-service-financial-sector/
I am able to work on my personal development and improve my Technical skills. I completed my developer and AI Engineer certifications this year.
In between my day job, I keep busy and code a lot to play around with different APIs and Technologies! I recently decided to start committing some of them to github. You can check out all the fun I’m having here: https://github.com/similola
2019 has been a year that answered questions from previous years. Foundations have been laid. Looking forward to 2020 and what the future holds.
Happy New Year!
