Tay's 2020 - A review

So I compiled a review last year but I felt I didn't have anything to pass or share, let's just say I was struggling with self confidence but seems I have gathered bits and bytes of confidence and here we go.

2020 was a year filled with ups and downs, though the pandemic didn't affect me much till around July when I had to come home but all I can say is I have had a lot to learn in 2020 in terms technical, soft and social skills.

I was thinking of how to share this review and how to break it down so I chose a month by month breakdown starting January till December.

Fasten your seat belts, I am about to share you a bit of my life in 2020.

January

The year started with me in school for SWEP 200 which is meant to be a program to help students who just finished their 2nd year in the university to gather skills they would need in the industrial world of their respective fields but I will say its nothing like that.

I had a lecturer come to tell us React was a PHP framework for back-end development (yeah, they didn't really know anything).

Enough with the sad story about my SWEP anyways, I was a Terragon Group intern at this point in my life and I was struggling to get the trust and attention of the senior developers as I wanted to be assigned tasks so I could grow better as a developer but I was hardly looked at so I had to learn on my own, some colleagues even called me "Yahoo boy" considering I did less worked but still got paid at the end of the month.

This month was the first month I started searching for online jobs in proper and I got to the final stages of two interviews but got rejected, one was because I had no knowledge about devops, the other was because.... I do not know, they didn't state why but I think they just found a better developer. I did not get any response after these two companies.

To end the story on this month, I started a 50 days of code challenge to keep me determined and I tried to be consistent.

I was shuffling between going to work, going for football training as the coach of my department, going for classes and learning. Tough right?? It was actually fun

February

I was busy fixing bugs for most of this month, at last I finally got some attention from the senior developers and I was going to be passed on another project (the previous developer in charge was about leaving). I also got hired into a start up Neohaul Technologies on the Feb 19th and I was running two jobs at this time.

The Neohaul Job needed me to work with node JS and I had only worked with nodeJS for about 10 days before the interview and I was hired (lucky me).

Now, SWEP!!! We were to work on a project so we decided to build a student assistant website were we tried using a microservice architecture (we were over engineering) and I worked on the Django app and assisted the NodeJS developers.

Nothing much about February.

March

School closed and Lockdown was imposed so I could not go to work as the office was deserted, I decided not to go home (trust me, I and my parents argued a lot before they let me stay).

Now there was more work with Neohaul and I was getting more comfortable with Nodejs and other tools they were using day by day.

Now to the sad news of this month, Terragon Group had all their interns laid off and I was left with one job now.

The day the news of being laid off was broken was the same day I got myself my personal PC. This was the first Laptop I was going to own after struggling with laptops given to my by friends (used 3 laptops owned by 3 different friends) and also a work laptop.

so Win for me.

April

Call this my broke month, had spent all on the laptop and was staying indoors all day, struggled with my mental health too as I had several things in my head.

First I was searching for attention from some certain friends, was struggling with finance. I saw myself locking myself for days and starving myself even if I could get food. My neighbors would come to knock and I would ignore as I was not ready to meet anyone.

This affected my work too as I made a mistake by firing a script which had a couple of data in the database corrupted.

April was a black month for my mental health, even Conan gray's album (Kid Krow) was the only thing I played all day.

May

Recovered from my mental ish, got a friend to come stay over with me so I would get less bored and I would think less. He was an amazing person and we both worked at the same company so work became easier.

Spent most of this month learning how to write better code and also how to manage time (It was ramadan so I had to prepare Sahur and Iftar myself and also write code).

Financially?? maybe better because I was able to work on a few freelance projects.

June

I would call this my best month ever, I applied to a lot of jobs and got a higher number of responses and even tests but never got hired to any but I had a boost of confidence this time.

I was also learning how to write better code also as I found myself refactoring Neohaul code base several times this month trying new things and making the app run faster.

The great part of this month started when we were to build a new product in called Broka[https://Broka.ng] and I had so much fun building this.

July

Now I was gonna get lonely as everyone around had gone home so I had to leave too.

Getting home, work was hella hard for me as I had to combine pikin duties with being a software developer with an uncomfortable workspace, slow internet and bad electricity. I had to burn fuel everyday.

Work on Broka was very intense this time around as I found myself staring at my screen most of the time

August

Nothing much, Broka got launched and it was live.

This was the month I got burnt out after mixing the duties of being a child by running my mom's shop all alone and also writing code for Broka.

There was a particular day I got into my room, locked myself in the room and broke into tears. Man was tired.

Light came when I got chosen to be the Lead of DSC OAU (Developer Student Club) and also got hired to an indian startup Weekend Labs LLP

September

Started my new job and was combining it with work at Neohaul this time I had more time to myself as I stayed indoors all day just writing code and listening to some Micheal Jackson 😎 .

I ended the month by resigning from Neohaul due to personal reasons, and while my parents tried to convince me to stay I told them "Do anything to keep you sane and owe no one an apology for doing so" and that is one statement that I try to follow.

October

My Birthday month 😎 .

I had to pause work because we were struggling with getting paid so we had to pause till we received our salaries.

I was excited about this month because finally I was gonna be 18 (shocking?? yeah, I am hella young).

My whole joy turned sour when the Endsars protest started and people got killed just few days to my 18th year birthday. Started the day with a call, text and an epistle from three different people at the same time. Boost in confidence... yeah.

November

Got back to work after receiving what I deserved and life felt good, nothing much about this month.

December

I will say I hated most of this month as I struggled with health, impostor syndrome, social denial, etc.

I had to deactivate twitter to find a way to love myself and make life changing decisions.

I think I made the right choice.

If you got to this part that means I didn't bore you that much.

I stated a couple of personal ish in this review which some people might be against me sharing them but I just want people to know that behind the smiles, lots of people have a lot in their head.

Great year though, I hope 2021 is gonna be better.