At the dawn of the year 2019, I was determined to make a difference in my Software Development career - looking back 12 months down the line, I am so grateful to God for the progress and the journey so far in becoming a more confident software engineer and to everyone who contributed in making this possible, I say thank you. Yes it was not without challenges but I am happy I made the choice, I  will be highlighting some of the high-points in my journey for 2019 in this post.

Microverse

I started out the year with my acceptance into Microverse full-time program - A coding school that accepts only 1% of applicants from all over the world to be trained as software developers. The program was nothing like I had experienced before, it was immersive but I loved every part of it, while on the program I met some wonderful developers @shloch, @Shshamim090, @raphael_noriode, @YirenkyiPhilip, @daniel_wesego, @juzQrios, and many others from around the world with whom I learned and worked together and this was done remotely, which made the experience even more exciting, and my mentor @jeton_thaci and career coach @TheBestCPRW who were very helpful along the way.

My progress while on the program was enormous, moving from a total novice in the Ruby programming language to building projects with the language such as minimal clone of FaceBook and Eventbrite, from a zero in JavaScript to learning advanced concepts of Object-Oriented and Functional Programming in JavaScript (ES6) and building projects such as a Restaurant page and the classic BattleShip game and from never using ReactJs to building my portfolio and a simple calculator with ReactJs and so many other things I learned along the way.

During the course of my learning this year I went through countless articles, video tutorials and courses of particular note is FreeCodeCamp and The Odin Project, to all the authors of these resources I am greatly indebted, if you never wrote that article, made that video or course, learning would be more difficult but you made it seamless, thanks for sharing your knowledge with the community. I was able to also pay it forward by writing my first technical article How I Setup SSH Access To My GitHub Repository and then two others How I Setup A Node Development Environment with Webpack and Eslint and Setting Up CORS On A Rails App.

Community

I am a firm believer in the role of communities as a pivotal part of our progress, this is summed up in the Ubuntu philosophy which states “I am because we are”. This is even more glaring in the journey of becoming a Software Engineer, it can be boring so quickly with so much to learn, for me, the tech community has been a driving force in my learning journey, in a bid to lighting up and gather momentum along, I found and joined the @bntechforum and @GDGMakurdi, two local tech communities in Benue, Nigeria doing amazingly well in supporting newbies locally to start a career in tech. I met so many wonderful developers and community leads just to mention a few @ea_pius, @amacodes, @umarauna, @auwalms,@josiahoyahaya, @Eko_Uko_Onaji, @comfort_egbe, @orpaakawejr, @Lewi_keezy you all made me go the extra mile in becoming a better coder, thanks again.
I attended many in-person meetups got many swags and had the opportunity of starting my journey as a tech speaker, I went on to speak at three tech events, DevFest in Makurdi, DevFest in Abuja and Evolve 1.0 in Makurdi at each of these events I was able to share my knowledge with the community and it was such an exciting experience.

I became part of the Tech Twitter community and I met a lot of wonderful influencers in tech, they all made the journey worthwhile as they shared their stories and lessons learned on their journeys as developers, a special thanks to @jamesqquick for gifting me a paid Udemy course. I was able to complete the #100DaysofCode challenge and I contributed to open source at the 2019 #OctoberFest celebration.

Mentorship

This year I volunteered to mentor and support newbies and experienced developers in tech both in-person and remotely, thanks to @andela_alc, Facebook DevC, @naijahacks, and @microverseinc for giving me the platform to share my knowledge with others.

My Machine

My 7-year-old Pet, Dell Latitude N5040 Laptop made all this possible, it has gone through a lot, thanks for keeping up with me this far.

2020

Wow! There will be more fun in 2020 as I will be doing more community work, speaking, writing and mentoring. I will also be learning new stuff like; GastbyJs, GraphQl, VueJs and lots more while also mastering my Ruby on Rails and ReactJs skills. I will also need a job where I can pour my energy.