2019: My Year in Review
This is another episode of my yearly review which I started last year, inspired by the wonderful Ire Aderinokun.
As I did last year, I am going to writing about the wonderful stuffs I got to do last year and some of the L’s I took in 2019. This is ranging from the book I read, to the skills I learnt, activities and the new things I did in 2018 etc. This is my own little way of bragging, looking back and patting myself in the back for a wonderful year.
Books
This year, I got to read eleven books centred around — politics, business, biographies, coding, and personal experiences. I was four books short of reaching my target for 2020. The books include:
- Bad Blood — John Carreyrou
- The Life and Times of a Musical Icon — Michael E Veal
- Fela: This Bitch of a Life — Carlos Moore
- The Subtle Art of Giving a Fuck — Mark Mason (I will probably never finish reading this book)
- On a Platter of Gold: How Jonathan, Won and Lost Nigeria — Bolaji Abdullahi
- Africa Rise and Shine — Jim Ovia
- No Excuses — Brian Tracy
- The Hard Things About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
- Against The Run of Play — Olusegun Adeniyi
- The Last Black Unicorn — Tiffany Haddish
- Front-End Developer 2019 Handbook — Cody Lindley (Recommended for newbie in Front end development).
Writing
This year, I wrote more articles, centred around politics and the side projects I was building. I also started a Whats App series which I discontinued after few series — Thursday Night with Ibukunoluwa. Links to the articles I wrote this year, can be found here:
- Religion and Getting Nigeria Working Again
- No Sidon Look
- Ontripp.com Partners: Sell your tours & activities online
- Day 0 at Ontripp.com
Side Projects & Work
I built two side projects (product design, product development, marketing, content development, customers acquisition etc.) with the help of a wonderful friend. The bad part, is that they are both closed down at the moment (still gonna work on it sometimes soon) and the good part, I made money from one of it. I re-branded and relaunched one at different halves of the year, but I still didn’t get it right but it was sweet working on it. Registered a business name — Ontripp.com Technologies.
- Ontripp — a website to find and book tours, activities to do in African countries. Reached over 500 tour operators across 18 African countries (lots of sleepless night, excel sheets and Malchimp ). Check it out here
2. Mopping — a website to hire professional cleaners for the home and office.
As for work, this year was the time of writing CV and cover letters to business organisations in order to secure SIWES placement, and I got an internship to work at the IT department, of one of the biggest financial institutions in Nigeria. It is a chilling experience. I also got my first work contract this year. I think I have made about $230 in total this year from all the work I did (made $0 last year).
Education & Professional Development
Moved into my third year in the University as a student of the department of Computer Science (na God o, School showed me pepper in year 2 but as always, we move).
This year, I chose a path in tech that I wanted to focus on, so I bought and started taking a course in Front-end Web Development on Udemy. I’m 48% done with the course (I got distracted and found it a bit hard to get the vibe back), pushed a fraction of code to GitHub and built a couple of websites this year, most times, using WordPress and other times, building on existing HTML/CSS templates (early days of a coder). Languages & Script — HTML 5, CSS3, Bootstrap, JavaScript and SQL.
Personal Development & Others
- I clocked 19.
- I wrote my first line of code and built my first website.
- I spent most of my time on the road.
- I met some very amazing people this year.
- I voted at the general election for the first time.
- I tried to volunteer to work as an ad-hoc staff during the election (postponement of the election ended that opportunity, but I saw terrible things while it lasted).
- I had massive fun — attended a concert for the first time, and went to the beach for the first time.
- Finally, i got elected into the Student Representative Assembly of my University (you can call me Honorable Ibukunoluwa from Computer Science Constituency).
Loss
- I was unable able to secure an internship at Andela, Cregital, Softcom or Anakle (Dream place to work).
- I had to rewrite some courses (most stressful thing I did in 2019).
- Closing down of Ontripp (I invested a lot of time into building this).
- Applied to Lambda School, but didn’t get accepted and many many more.
What about 2020?
Start of a new decade, the foundation of the future. It’s a leap year, 12 months and 366 days to achieve a lot of things. I’m thinking of trying to choose one milestone to hit every month. I intend to be more focused on a path, rather than do everything together.
- Apply to every course, fellowship, program and conference I find available that will be useful to me.
- Continue with the course (The Complete Web Developer: Zero to Mastery) and finish it before June 2020. Learn more Front-end stack, push more codes to GitHub.
- Be financially disciplined.
- Travel to as far as my parents and personal purse can carry me to.
- Read 15 books including the Holy Bible (14 Books + 1 Bible).
- Build, build and build side projects.
- Possibly speak at a tech conference or meetup.
- Write more articles (project work, technical, and politics & governance).
- Be more productive with Twitter.
- Learn how to swim.
Happy New Year Everyone
PS: If you think Ontripp is a cool idea and you have some technical and financial ability and will like to collaborate. Find me here