My 2018 Year in Review: Step in the right direction
For some reasons, my review for the year has been delayed... It’s unusual and I guess I was carried away with the excitement of achievements and the enthusiasm of personal and career goals for the coming year.
Call this an addiction, you are definitely right! To be honest, reflecting on my activities for the year started in 2017 and I have decided to make it a tradition, no looking back!.
It's always an amazing experience to count your blessings and review your failures in order to get better at success, these are some of the reasons I did not give up on putting another review together for this year 2018.
My 2017 review was aptly tagged as a Journey to greatness as I started a journey of giving back to the tech community by writing technical articles which in returns has immensely helped me to amass a lot of technology prowess that would take me far in my Software Engineering career. Needless to say that, it wasn’t fun all through as there were few ups and downs and believe me, some goals were not achieved.
Having set a lot of reasonable and incredible goals in 2017 for my activities this year, I consider all my input, every single line of code, sacrifices and life decisions this year as a Step in the right direction.
Open Source Projects
In the spirit of building my technical skills, giving back to the tech community and making some incredible contributions to open source, I created my very first project this year. It was called a Symfony hackathon-starter. Thanks to Olaolu Olawuyi for the graphics
This project was basically a Kickstarter for any PHP developer who uses Symfony in order to stay ahead of others during a hackathon. Much more than that, this project goes beyond hackathon purposes only, as it will definitely save any developer hours or even days of development time and can serve as a learning guide for web developers in general.
As soon as the project was completed, I tweeted about it and got a lot of positive reaction and responses from the Symfony community at large. Take a look at the tweets below:
Moreso, despite the tight schedules and few obligations, I still manage to write a lot of code (about 900 contributions to GitHub). This was way better than what I did the previous year and I am so excited about that.
Majority of the contributed code were either the demo applications for my technical articles, contribution to other repositories and my personal open source projects.
Writing
Giving back to the tech community, learning, passion, and self-motivation were really the main push for me to continue writing this year. I actually spent a lot of time researching about technologies that I have never worked with before. Web technologies like Ruby on Rails, Django. Tools like docker and so on.
This was one of my main goal in 2017, developing my technical writing skills and sharing my code and expertise with other developers in particular and the whole tech community at large. It was a fulfilling experience and lots of excitement as I was able to contribute contents to blogs that have helped me immensely with their technical articles.
I’m noting the blogs below:
Cloudways
Here on this platform, I contributed mainly a lot of content on building modern web applications using Symfony and combining it with some of the most popular JavaScript frontend frameworks like React.js and Vue.js.
Digital Ocean
Joined Digital Ocean as a guest author to mainly write about open source technologies, share the technical steps in order to teach other Software engineers and grow as an author. Many thanks to Christian Nwamba for sharing the link with me. I have written an article with others currently under review.
Auth0
Auth0 blog is another platform that I have always wanted to write for basically because I love their products and the culture of the company as displayed online. Joining the team as a guest author felt like a dream come true. Here is an article that I have written and I’m currently working on another.
Scotch.io
I have always loved to contribute to the technical contents on scotch.io, I even planned to the one of the top contributing author this year. But unfortunately, I only have one published content this year and others currently under review.
Others articles include
Work
Freelance
Things took a different dimension for me this year as I had to spend an integral part of the year working as a freelance developer. I worked on several projects with other teams and individually I built https://pennylender.com/ and https://baza.ng/.
The former is an online loan and lending platform:
While baza.ng is more like a single platform that offers you much more than just paying utility bills or recharging your phone but also connect you with some of the popular merchants in town that will offer you discounts on some of their services.
How this works is, you recharge a particular amount and get a coupon equivalent to that amount. You can then visit the selected merchant to redeem your coupon. Basically to show you that you deserve more.
Be sure to visit any of these platforms, you’ll be glad you did.
Moat Academy
I was involved as a trainer in one of the coding Bootcamps for aspiring software engineers called Moat academy.
Moat academy is a software development training school and intensive Bootcamp birthed to help aspiring software engineers to learn the fundamentals of software development and accelerate their career path in the industry.
Life
Got Married
This is definitely the most important event for me this year. Getting to finally walk down the aisle with my high school crush. As stated in my review for 2017, we reconnected to get serious with our relationship after 13 years of irregular communication.
Funmilayo is an extraordinary amazing lady that I just couldn’t wait to change her surname 😙 😄 and spend the rest of my life with her.
Yes, I did it!, I took that bold step and proposed to her.
We got married in November 2018 and it’s been incredibly amazing and we can only pray for more moments of love for each other.
Thanks for all the love and care funmilayo. I love you!
Working out
I started visiting the Gym this year. The main motivation was actually to look good, stay fit and healthy. I have slowed down the pace for now and I do hope to get back to keeping fit in 2019.
Family
My parents (and in-laws) are doing great. We all had a fantastic year glory to God. I am also more grateful for wonderful friends who were there for me this year. God bless you all.
Registered my company
I was able to finally register my company name this year. This was an important accomplishment for me as it was one of my main goals as stated in 2017. Visit the website and reach out if you need any bespoke software delivered to you
My blog
I needed to own personal space for sharing my knowledge with the world at large. To facilitate that, I registered a new domain and created a blog built from scratch using Symfony and Vue.js.
I planned to publish new contents at least, once every month on various web technology stacks and not just PHP only.
This blog is work in progress as it still requires few restructuring. Be sure to bookmark the page and visit.
Speaking
I didn’t get to speak at any conference this year. I can only hope for opportunities and look forward to a lot of speaking in 2019
Finally
Wrapping up… Generally, I am extremely happy with how things panned out this year. It was really a busy and an amazing year and I hope to surpass any of my achievements come 2019.
I am grateful to you all; great friends who have contributed greatly to my success this year, I am nothing without you all. Thanks for the motivation and prayers. Thank you Prior Famous Ehichioya, Christian Nwamba, Adebayo Olajuwon Moses, Elijah Valentine Troy Abako, Valentine, Fidelia Unifoh, Shahroze Nawaz, Bidemi Daniel Olumide
Plans for 2019
Busy year huh? Here are the plans to conquer more territories next year.
- More participation at tech events
- Build more open source projects
- Write more technical articles and publish contents on my blog at least once a month
- I want to be a source of motivation to other developers. I personally envy the likes of Prosper Otemuyiwa, Christian Nwamba and other great developers who spend a lot of time and resources helping to enhance developers’ skillset.
- I was and still obsessed about speaking at a conference (International or local) that I had to tweet about my intention to speak at the popular annual SymfonyLive conference:
This dream is still very much alive, I am just going to have to work hard at it and make it happen in 2019.
Let us do this again in 2019 🔥🔥🔥
