2019 in Review: Going Remote
Last year (2018) I didn’t write a review because, after the kind of 2017 I had, I felt 2018 not as memorable enough. In hindsight, I should still have written about it because reviews are a time to reflect on what has happened and build on.
A little on 2018
It was a quiet year. Both career-wise and in my personal life. I spent most of my time working on school work (University) and my final year project. I landed my first freelance project and it was a lot of fun to work on at the time. I also joined Ray Okaah to start codeclubph — a community of developers and aspiring developers in the University of Port Harcourt and around. We held a couple of events to teach participants Android and Web development, provide mentoring and resources to improve their learning. I improved my programming skills a little bit while working the freelance job but most of it was just relevant to the job. Towards the end of the year, I got what I’ll call my first job in tech as a Frontend Developer at Sprinthub Mobile. I spent a couple of months there before moving on. That’s pretty much it as far as I remember.
Enter 2019
From the get-go, I knew I wanted different results in 2019. I was not happy with my 2018 so I made up my mind to do more. I set different goals about what I wanted to achieve and here’s how it went down:
Writing
Towards the end of 2018, I started re-building my personal website. I say re-building because I’ve done it a couple of times now and it’s kinda become an end of year ritual at this point (skipped it this year though :|). I knew I would love to do more technical writing so I created a blog section. As a learning experience, I decided to build it from scratch and keep any 3rd party libraries to a minimum. With some effort, I succeeded in building the website without using any CSS/JS libraries which I thought was cool. The admin section where I write the blog posts, however, was a different ball game.
Tbh, the interface is shit (lol) but I’m not really since I’m the only one that sees it. The most challenging part to figure out was building the online editor and storing/retrieving the articles from the database. Between building an editor from scratch (which I have actually done in the past, I may want to do this again) and using 3rd party library, I opted for the latter (I can’t come and kill myself and all that). I settled with Quilljs which was relatively easy to set up.
Setting up the website was fun and I got some awesome reviews after putting it out there which made me pleased. On my personal blog, I only managed 9 articles most of which I wrote in the first half of 2019. There’s a reason why I didn’t write much which I’ll touch on in the next section. I wrote an additional 3 articles on 2 other platforms. We go again in 2020.
Working
From working onsite to contract to freelance to remote, I had a slice of everything in 2019. As I mentioned earlier, towards the end of 2018 I started working at Sprinthub Mobile. I’ve always wanted to get that experience of being a part of a team and working on projects cool stuff and here came the opportunity. I spent a lot of time trying out new technologies to meet up with my assigned tasks. It was here I met Steve Anthony. Steve is a UI/UX designer and we worked closely during my time there. It’s the first time I’ve worked with a designer and it was really great. I picked up a couple of design principles I still use to date. I also met NaijaTechGuy at Sprinthub, who is just a bundle of things. Blogger, Designer, Wordpress ninja, spam bot developer (lol), you name it.
By March-end, I decided I needed a change and stopped working at Sprinthub Mobile. I started freelancing again and I worked on a project with a team based in Lagos. It didn’t work out so we parted ways before the end of the project. I try to look out for positives in every situation so if not for anything, the project stretched me to pick up new things which I now use every day at work. Funny how these things work out in the end.
I wasn’t doing anything for a few weeks until I got a contract job. During this time, I worked with Derek Vinebo. The nature of the job was pretty straight forward so we just got on with it. At this point, I was sending out applications to companies on a daily basis. I wasn’t keen on relocating to Lagos as that’s where the jobs are in Nigeria so even when I got a few breaks, they all wanted me to be in Lagos so I just kept looking. Towards the end of May, I finally got two offers: a 3-month paid remote internship with a company based in Mauritius and a fulltime remote job with a company based in Lagos. For those who may not be familiar with the term “remote”, it simply a type of setting where the employees of a company work from various locations but during a specified period of time.
I went with the latter and spent the rest of 2019 working there. This, by the way, is why I couldn’t write as much as I set out to write at the beginning of the year. I’m working on a team to build actual products for some really good companies and startups. And the best part of it is that I can do this from the comfort of my house. With the SARS situation currently going on in the country, I don’t even feel safe moving about like that since practically every fellow techie I know has had an encounter. I’m an introvert so I’m more productive in this way and I’m proud of the work I’ve been able to do so far. It’s been an amazing experience.
Speaking
I didn’t really plan for many speaking engagements this year. I ended up speaking at just two events, one which was technical and the other less so.
World Interaction Design Day PH
IXDA Port Harcourt held an event themed “Trust and Responsibility” on the 24th of September. My talk was titled Building Trust in Remote Teams which is basically a take-home from what I had learned from working remotely up to that point. Maple Dappa gave a talk on “Strengthening Soft Skills”, Peace Ojemeh (Perrie) gave a talk on “Connecting Empathy” and Donald Okudu spoke on “Trust and Responsibility. Sharing the stage with the people was a privilege. Richard Tamunotonye and his team really did a fine job putting this event together.
Devfest Port Harcourt
The annual Google Developers Group Festival that takes place from September to December in various cities around the world. I always have a soft spot for GDG because it’s the first place I met my fellow programmers at a point when I needed to find other people like me. I facilitated a session on Building Serverless Web Apps with Firebase.
I sent proposals for other Devfests in the country some of which I got some positive responses but due to logistics, timing, and delivery, I couldn’t make it to the others.
A few people have reached out to me about how to get speaking engagements and give talks. While I’m not an expert, I believe it’s not rocket science. Event organizers usually put out a Call-for-Speakers (CFP) and potential speakers apply to speak at the event. If your talk gets the attention of the organizers, you get an invitation. In other cases, the organizers reach out to people they feel are good in a specific field to give a talk at their event.
Let’s say you want to speak but you don’t know what to talk about. Personally, I speak about things I’m already familiar with. There are things you already know that will be helpful to someone else so as long as it matches the theme for an event, just apply. You’ll be more comfortable since speaking on something you know which would give you more confidence. Practice your talk a couple of times before you give it. As you begin to build expertise in an area, people will reach out to you to speak on your area of expertise.
Rounding up
I consider myself very fortunate with the opportunities I’ve gotten in tech. I’m not smarter than the next person or more hardworking than anyone. On the contrary, I’m quite lazy. I just try to focus the little energy I have to build on things that my common sense tells me to focus on. If you are just starting out in tech or thinking about changing careers to tech, you should know it takes time. It takes time to get your footing and that time depends on you. Some people take 6 months, other people 3 years or even more. The main thing is you identify one path, outline goals you want to achieve and work towards achieving them. There are many distractions, don’t allow them to get to you. Be an expert at one thing and watch how the doors will open.
Happy New Year!
