2020 In Review

I'm thankful to God that I made it to the end of the year 💛

A lot happened this year. Even to me, personally. I never understood what being "depressed" meant, until I experienced it. But I'm grateful to God that things are getting better.

There are a few highlight-able things for this year. I'm writing this to document my journey and also in the hopes that someone finds this useful.

Career

A big part of what made this year very special to me was the growth in my career. I actually started the year very hopeful.

My Technical Writing Career

I have been writing for Soshace since last year. January 1st, I launched a web dev blog, TheWebFor5, and was able to put out 32 articles on the platform before my schedule became tight. Esther also contributed in writing for TheWebFor5. Thank you Esther.

I also got the opportunity to join wonderful people at FreeCodeCamp in sharing web dev topics. Thank you Quincy.

From March, I was able to get a few Ghost article contracts, and around May, I was accepted as a Guest Author at LogRocket.

I've tried severally to get into Smashing and CSS Tricks, but I've been aired. Sigh. I move again next year!

Also for writing, I created the 2Articles1Week Challenge as a means to keep me focused and determined in my writing career. I hoped to run it all through the year but I had to give up at some point. I was able to write 2 articles for 32 weeks during that challenge (some ghost, some public), making at least 64 articles written this year.

Last year, I wrote around 20 articles, but this year, I roughly calculated writing 80 more articles, which is around 100 in total. I'm hopefully going to document that achievement, maybe, "100 written articles...omo!"

Writing has been awesome for me. Improved my writing skills, got me some income and connected me to people around the world. Love it.

My first official job 🎉

I was very hopeful at the beginning of the year about getting a remote job. Although at a point, it was difficult for me to believe I would get a job, being a potential junior developer with roughly 1.5 years of experience (as a freelancer). Many devs on Twitter shared their numerous rejections per day or week, and I got discouraged because these devs claimed to have been job-seeking for many months, some years, and me here, just started. It seemed to me like I shouldn't expect a job anytime soon.

Well, I kept on applying, accepting my rejections, and moving on. I also tried improving my skills and trying to build projects, because I've heard that I could win recruiters' heart by works I've done. I already got some sustainable (a bit, at least for data) income through writing, so I wasn't really depressed when I got rejections. Except some specific applications where I felt like I've got all required skills.

Fortunately, around September, I landed a Software Engineering job at ThisDot. I've learned a ton, and made really awesome co-workers.

I'm a co-founder

My friend, Benjamin and I are currently building SkulMart. It's an online store for business management in schools in Nigeria. More to come.

Mental Health

I had a lot ongoing from the beginning of the year. I used coding to distract myself but it could only help for so long. I decided to cheer myself up with the things, friends and everything around me. Tried finding happiness around me.

Towards the end of the year, I finally learned to "live a life", at least that's what it means to me. Naturally, I'm not an introvert, but I got so involved in coding that it seemed like the only life I had. Building projects, learning languages and writing were the major things I classified as happiness. Movies? Gaming? A little flexing? No. They seemed to me like a waste of time when I could be doing something better.

I'm probably more relaxed now that I've gotten a job, or I don't know the real reason, but I've come to learn that I need to find other sources of happiness. I can't be calling APIs all my life. Currently, I'm trying to strike a balance between "living a life" and doing my coding job.

My mum has told me severally: "this life na just one", and I'm trying to live with it.

Friends?

Sure! Made a number this year. Mostly from Dev Twitter, then work, and the places that my articles have travelled to...haha

Conclusion

In all, God is great. As much as I was hopeful for the year, I sincerely feel like God just looked at my expectations, laughed, and said, "Lol, this is what you want? Do you know what I can give you". I expected just a job, but God gave me even more.

3 things I leared this year in a tweet

2021

I'm building my relationship with God, learning more of French, would try this working out thing (amen!), be intentional about my happiness and my growth, learn a lot, write a lot and build stuffs.

Also, I'd be doing more with my team on SkulMart.

I'm also very very hopeful about 2021. So let's see.

Merry new year 💛