2018 in a Review

5 min readFeb 14, 2019

An unexamined life is not worth living
- Socrates

I have never done a year review before. Last year, I purposed to write about my 2017, but thanks to procrastination, that didn’t happen. I probably would have done the same this year (that is procrastinate) till I saw this tweet.

Finally getting to write this made me realize how far I have come in the last year. It brought to my understanding how little efforts could amount to great things, how team work is the key to success (never has competing with your peers helped anyone), how I came short of my plans for the year and what I have to do in 2019.

Here they are, my 2018 in few paragraphs

Achievements

2018 started great with my team winning Fishackathon Benin city. We worked on a solution to connect local fishermen to experts and academians. My team included Brian Iyoha, Ifeanyi Madu and Paul Okoduwa. It was pretty stressful as electricity and network wouldn’t let us be great. I recall spending close to 50mins trying to setup initial files for the project due to slow internet.
My team including David Ilenwabor, Esan John and Paul Akhamiogu won the first University of Benin ICT App contest. We worked on a solution called AttSys which simplifies the process of taking attendance in large classes. Students get to take attendance with their mobile phones and the process is vetted with Geofencing and Facial recognition. We built the MVP (which included two mobile apps for lecturers and students, and an admin panel) in less than 2 weeks. It was really stressful as we had to attend our normal academic classes in the day and code at night. To be honest, I never thought we would be able to pull it off in such a short time, but with the right team, anything is possible. One thing I learnt the hard way is to never push secret keys to git. (Oh well, that’s a story for another day)

Work

I joined the wonderful team at Cura Network, which aims to redesign the future of health care systems using blockchain technology, as a remote software developer.
I worked remotely on a lot of projects. There was a time I was working on 4 intense projects concurrently coupled with school work. It really drained me and the first thing I did this year was to reduce the number of projects I work on at a time to 2 at most.

Volunteer

I became a core team member of DSCUniben. I worked with other core team members to plan and execute our first official workshop which had over 80 attendees. I introduced the participants to backend development and walked them through building a basic app with Django. It was pretty fun! I also assisted in preparing learning curriculums for members.

I volunteered as a community mentor in ALC 3.0 where I helped to guide 70+ learners from across Africa through the specified curriculum by Udacity. It was a really fun experience. I made new friends and learnt a lot in the process. After the program, all South-South LCAs agreed to go to Port Harcourt to appreciate ourselves.

Apparently, I was looking at the wrong camera 😂

Got to try out the famous Port Harcourt Boli which had many obstacles 😁

I volunteered as a Python tutor at Codesign camp, where I introduced about 20+ undergraduates to python programming and showed them the various ways they could use python in their various fields of study.
I assisted in planning and executing 2 leadership conferences organized by AIESEC Benin city.

Others

I got a new laptop just before the year ended. My previous laptop was so bad that I could barely get 2hrs of battery life even when I had 3 batteries and it’d take years to boot 😪. I spent about 3 months searching for the right laptop and even built a price monitoring tool to send me emails of the best laptop deals 😅 (I’ll probably make this open source this year). The laptop pretty much made my account bleed 😭 but it was worth it.

It was love at first sight 😍(and 2 hours of testing for defects 😁)

I was supposed to graduate in 2018 but that didn’t happen due to the industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). Hopefully, I should graduate this year.
I improved in my collaboration and teamwork skills as I found myself working with different teams last year.
There were times I suffered the impostor syndrome, but thanks to the support from close friends, I was able to overcome it.
I barely had up to 100 contributions on Github in 2018. I realized it was major because I worked on less open source projects (Bitbucket is my goto for private projects). I also developed a bad habit of waiting until the project was complete before committing and pushing my code. There was a time I had to rewrite code for about 3 projects I had built 😭. My hard disk crashed, lost the project code and when I tried to pull the saved files from Github, I realized I had pushed minified(uneditable) files all along. It was a painful experience. This year I intend working on more open source projects and making commits as I work on projects.