Early this year, I read Prosper's 2018 year review and it inspired me to do and accomplish a lot and is also the reason I've decided to also start writing my year review as well.

2019 has been a year of ups and downs for me, mostly ups 😁. The first quarter of 2019 was not so pleasant for me, but I was able to bounce back, turn things around and have a great year.

At the beginning of the year, I did not plan to do some of the things I did, my only plan/goal was to become a better software developer, all the other things like writing, mentoring came along
from people around me pushing me to greatness.

Humbling moment of 2019 🙇🏾‍♂️

I took a technical interview sometime this year for a position at a company, turned out it was to be taken on Codility. It was my first time hearing/interacting with the platform, I was used to Hackerrank mostly then.

Fast-forward, I took the test on Codility, I think there were 3 questions. I solved about 2 of them, with sample tests passing, only for me see the results and I got 0%.

I later learned that the example test cases did not count toward the final score results. I knew I wasn't that good with Algorithms and Data Structures then but I never expected to get 0% in a coding challenge.

It was truly a humbling experience that just made me realize I had lots of things I still needed to learn. Since then I've taken courses on Data Structures & Algorithms, and also solved coding challenges from time to time.

Work & Personal Projects 👨🏾‍💻

Work

• Andela: At the beginning of the year, I was working for Andela as a Software Engineer, and it was a great experience for me, I met lots of fantastic people with great minds who pushed me to give my very best. On September 17, however, Andela laid off about 400 engineers (read about it here), sadly I was one of them.

Andela invested a lot in me, and I'd be forever grateful for the experiences and the support that Andela showed, even after we were laid off.

• Lambda School: I started work as a Technical Team Lead at Lambda School in November, and it has been quite an experience. I work with people from diverse backgrounds, and it has been an opportunity for me to improve my leadership and communication skills.

Some of my responsibilities as a Technical Lead include:

• Leading a team of learners that emulates a real work environment using the agile methodology.
• Mentoring learners on how to learn effectively and solve programming problems.
• Providing daily feedback and issue resolution of all curriculum through slack help channel or code review.
• Delivering one-on-one feedback and code review daily.
• Reviewing student code and giving feedback on areas of improvement.
• Leading daily standup meetings to build camaraderie, facilitate sharing of ideas and work progress, and provide guidance for that week's study material.

Personal Projects

This year was my most active year on Github, I made 3,164 contributions working on projects, as well as open-source contributions in 2019.

Some of the fun projects I developed are:

• Portfolio: I built my Portfolio with Gatsby to learn the amazing prowess of Gatsby and GraphQL.
• Blog: This was built using one of the Gatsby starters, I also used this as an opportunity to learn more about Gatsby & GraphQL.
• Use My Tech Stuff: This project was built to demonstrate my understanding of React & Redux.
• Marvel Comics: This was a fun project I decided to build with Marvel's API.
• School In The Cloud: This project was built for demonstrating my understanding of Flexbox.
• Multi-User Dimension Game: This was a team project built with React & Python to further establish an understanding of Data Structures and Algorithms.

Writing ✍🏾

I started writing around July 2019 and I have written a total of 10 articles this year, including this one. I write on my experiences with tools and technologies as well as teaching how to use different tools.
My first ever article was on Deploying React app from Github to Netlify.

Writing has not exactly been easy for me, I was not able to write as much this year as I would have loved to. I'm still trying to figure out the best way that works for me, what topics to write on, but I believe I'll get better with time and consistency.
I want to give special shoutouts to Johnson, Chinedu and Xavier(XROLE) for their support and motivation, and for helping me find bugs in my articles 🤪.

I've gotten some good feedback from people as to how my articles helped them one way or another, which just motivates me to want to do more.

Top 5 articles of the year

Testing Node API with Mocha & Chai

Ekunola Ezekiel ・ Aug 22 '19

#testing #javascript #node #tutorial

Deploying React App from Github to Netlify

Ekunola Ezekiel ・ Jul 4 '19

#react #javascript #beginners #webdev

Setting up a Node API with Postgres and Knex

Ekunola Ezekiel ・ Sep 16 '19

#beginners #node #javascript #tutorial

Getting started with React & Apollo Client

Ekunola Ezekiel ・ Sep 30 '19

#react #graphql #beginners #webdev

My first experience with Gatsby

Ekunola Ezekiel ・ Nov 4 '19

#webdev #javascript #gatsby #graphql

Community

Open Source

I always wondered what contributing to Open Source meant 😅 and how it was possible, well I was able to find out this year. I contributed to several open source projects this year as well as participating for the first time in the Hacktoberfest challenge.
I also wrote about my contributions to the Hacktoberfest challenge here.

Some of the Open Source projects I contributed to in 2019 below:

• Gatsby
• Developer Portfolios
• Oh-my-zsh

Events

This year, I was only able to attend the concatenate and unstack events held in Lagos, Nigeria.

At the events, I learned a lot with topics ranging from Design, Communication, Accessibility, Building JAMStack apps, GraphQL & Gatsby, Functional Programming and so on. I was also able to network and connect with other people in the tech industry, and also find out the interesting things they've been building and developing.

I just want to thank the organizers of the events for putting them together. It was an awesome experience for me, and I can't wait to see what they have for us come 2020 🤗.

Mentorship

I was able to be part of the mentors of the DevCTraining program where I mentored participating learners, provided technical support, reviewed their code, and also delivered feedback to them.

Shoutouts 📣

Special thanks to Johnson, Chinedu, Chidimma, Xavier(XROLE), Ebenezer and everyone for making my 2019 🔥, encouraging, guiding, pushing, and providing me with the much crucial support. I'm really glad to have met you all 🤗.

Plans for 2020

• Writing ✍🏾: In 2020, I'm looking to write way more than I did this year.
• Community 👨🏾‍💻: I want to be more involved in the developer community in the coming year. This means more volunteer work and also contributing more to open source projects and building developer tools.
• Reading 📖: I have never been a fan of reading books 😩, even though I've tried to. This year, I managed to finish reading a book titled Eat a frog, by Brian Tracy. My target next year is to read at least 10 books.
• Travel 🛫: I did a little or no traveling in 2019. Next year I'm looking to travel to at least 2 countries.

2020 is a year of doing more of the things I kickstarted this year. Looking forward to an awesome and exciting year ahead 🚀🚀🚀.

Originally published on my blog