2017. Sentō kaishi
(This read — and honestly any other one — would be nicer if you had Final by Wilsen playing.)
Sentō kaishi. This simply means “battle start”. It’s the thing you hear just right before you start mashing a game controller when playing Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm.
Not only does it sound cool (I love Japanese but can’t speak yet), it adequately describes how I feel about a certain aspect of 2017.
I had plans for 2017. Pretty much every single one of them didn’t pan out.
I wanted to travel this year, it’s been a while, I haven’t travelled in like 10 years. I also wanted to see Sylvan Esso live.
Sylvan Esso is why I chose to go to London, nothing else, as it’s not exactly the funnest/most exotic place to go to. We got tickets to the show really really early. But that was before my visa application got rejected, twice. Something about the haphazard nature of my income inflow.
I wanted to get a full time job in 2017. I needed stability. Not because freelancing wasn’t paying enough, in fact I was willing to earn less as long as I could be sure that I’d get x amount of money every month. The reason I wanted this is so that I could spend a year lowkey working on this very technically challenging array of products codenamed Progressive.
I didn’t get the job. I’d been applying since 2016. And it’s either the position gets filled with someone who already lives in America or that the company realized that they didn’t actually have the budget for a new engineer (after pretty much completing the whole interview process). There were some that didn’t get back to me at all and some that I just wasn’t the best fit for.
I wanted to be done with Uni this year. This happened, but not in the way I planned. The initial plan was to actually, finally, graduate. But 2017 worked it’s magic, shitty things happened, and I ended up deciding not to go back.
Don’t get me wrong, awesome things happened this year. I’m just writing some of the plans that fell through first for dramatic effect.
I bought my first car in 2017.
Moved out of Shomolu into this relatively cool duplex with F.Merry and Jubril Olambiwonnu in 2017.
Finished my Machine Learning Nanodegree in 2017.
Started working with Tal Ater on dav.network in 2017.
Made 2026 contributions on Github in 2017.
I spent a whole year with Ire Aderinokun in 2017.
Went to Abeokuta with the gang and enjoyed the awesome experience of Ake Festival (for the first time) in 2017.
I took a three month break from work in 2017. I just needed to breathe, the elas I was getting from places I applied to were choking me. I spent a huge part of those three months getting obsessed with cryptocurrency and building something that I felt was necessary.
I started Bitkoin Africa in 2017. Bitkoin is the battle I spoke of earlier. I don’t know how to fully convey just how challenging it has been building and running this thing. But so far, it’s been rewarding as all hell. I’ve enjoyed every single bug, every minute of working with Fool-Saint., Tola Agunbiade, Oluro Olaoluwa, Olabinjo, Ire Aderinokun, Sandra Israel-Ovirih, Adewale Akande, Yele Bademosi, Maze the Polymath. and Reformed. I couldn’t have done any of it without them.
However, this is just the beginning. There’s still a shit ton of work to do and it’s both exciting and scary at the same time.
Anyway guys, I have to go and face real life. December rocks has defeated me and I’m still feeling the effects of last night’s partying.
Sayōnara! 🎆
