Pondering on how to start this review as I pen down these thoughts in my journal. Oops! I guess I've started already.
This is the first time I'll be doing this EOY — End of Year — review thing, so I'll try to be brief as much as possible. By the way, there's an opensource project that curates the year-in-review articles of folks in the tech community.
You can decide to contribute to it by adding any EOY review article you find, or give it a star if you're not able to. The goal of the project is to be able to have all these reviews as a form of motivation for people.
I'll be using a particular approach I saw Ire Aderinokun use, in her 2021 year in review article, where she split her article into three segments/questions.
- What went well this year?
- What didn't go so well this year?
- What did I learn?
This pattern was gotten from James Clear's annual reviews that he does — yearly.
I'll be starting in a haphazard manner because this year-in-review article is dedicated to folks like me who have experienced the worst this year. So, I'll take the second question — What didn't go so well this year? — first, then unto the stuff I learned and back to question one.
This year was full of shits and classic pitfalls.
I wasn't going to write any EOY review this year. I don't even plan on doing so, in the coming years. I'd rather just reflect on how my year went, in solitude. But, many thanks to the EOY feedback I received from Aliyyah, I was like: "screww this, I'll just put it out there!"
Of the greatest calamities I experienced this year, being in school was the most preposterous amongst them all. God! I hated my time in school, this year. This was probably because of the stupid illusion that I and my folks had presumed about being in our finals.
We thought things were probably gonna be a bit easier than the previous years. Well, jokes on us!
It was so messed up to a point that almost all three quarters of this year were lored in anguish. From not vibing with the final year project/thesis I was working on, to almost spilling over and having an extra year. YES, I failed my supervisor's course.
Anytime I remember the mental stress I and my folks had to go through during that phase, I just smile — sadly.
Luckily, my school has this summer program that enables students to "retake" courses they "failed". But, this time around, you'd have to pay per unit of the course load or something like that shaaa — NGN10,000 per unit, aside from the registration fee, which is around NGN20,000.
I've had so many experiences with failure, but this one was just too much! I remember feeling so downtrodden. Had to cover the payments with part of the money I got from technical writing. Got the rest from my Dad.
What's funny about this whole escapade with "failure" was that some of my folks too were affected, and we had to go through the summer program. The occurrence brought my attention to a quote from an article — Who is speaking on your behalf — written by Prosper Otemuyiwa
I realized that being smart and working hard was not enough. It still wasn’t getting me at the top of the class.
I'd have loved to talk about the shites that goes on in my department. But, that doesn't matter anymore now, does it?
Amidst all these shites, I met a very remarkable person that I could literally rant to, in those perilous times. Hell, I think I'd have gone insane if there was nobody to talk to. I was losing my mind, literally.
One hill I'm willing to die on — regarding the education system, NO, scratch that, it isn't even worthy of being addressed as such. So I'm just gonna term it the "schooling system" — of this country that, it is a complete waste of people's time, glory, and destinies. There's nothing anyone can tell me about it.
The classic pitfall
When I thought I was over the sadness of this year, yet, another calamity struck.
I got a job to work as a remote Frontend Engineer at an Israeli organization in Ramat Gan, this month. Bruhh!!! I was so elated about the opportunity. I learned so much about how work is done in a professional setting in just a little amount of time.
Learned so many things about my field. Tools that would've probably taken me well... years to use, if I had to learn them on my own.
Hell, I was already writing E2E — End to End — tests with Cypress, externalizing the tests so that other people can be able to use them seamlessly with fixtures, went on to start intercepting network requests to the backend when we're testing just the UI. We call it stubbing.
Reminds me of this TV show I watched recently — The peripheral — They had this multi-dimensional explanation of what a Stub is.
Little did I know that this would be the shortest amount of time I'd have worked at an organization in my entire life — Two weeks!
How did this even happen, you might ask. Well, my exit was as a result of a "holiday-or-no-holiday" discussion.
Told me boss that I wouldn't be able to report to work on Monday, December 26th, 2022. Since Christmas day fell on a Sunday and the public holiday here in 9ja had been shifted to Monday and Tuesday, if I'm correct. But I'll resume on Tuesday. I honestly thought this was a normal thing to say, little did I know that it probably wasn't to him.
Next thing I knew, I had been removed from the organization on GitHub, and I had gotten a message from him on slack — after my access to other channels have been restricted — saying that I am not a "good fit for the organization". Mumu me, I should've known better. so many red flags, but I still went on to accept the contract.
For a moment it was oddly satisfying that I had been fired, and for another moment... "moni fuuccccckkk!!!" Sapa will be around the corner, very soon. Had a call the next week to discuss his actions with me. I was already hellbent on resigning, so I did.
Now, I'm back on the streets, looking for a Job! This year was tumultuous, ngl!
Despite the evasiveness
Good things happened this year, but not in the magnitude I expected.
For a start, I was able to read three books: Zero to One — Peter Thiel, Atomic Habits — James Clear, The 5AM Club — Robin Sharma, and I'm currently reading Steal Like an Artist — Austin Kleon
The lessons I obtained from Atomic Habits and The 5AM Club suddenly allowed me to pique an interest in Human and behavioral psychology, to an extent that I can say I read about ten articles around various studies. Planning to do more next year.
This year too, I gave two talks, one was virtual and the other was at DevFest Ilorin — It was around web performance. I have an article coming up, around the Performance of images on the web, I'll share it when it is ready.
I can say that I made an impact within the Google Developer community on my campus, and I'm super pumped about the direction they're heading towards, now, and in the coming years.
Super grateful for the awesome folks in my life. Damn! They're all exceptional! One other thing I'm most grateful for is having nothing to do with academics in this country for the rest of my life!
Next year is for the thefts I have saved for later, and madass optimization in solitude.