2023 Year in Review

Hello from yours truly. I have been able to pick up the habit of writing yet again and this is me recounting my experience from this year. In the beginning I didn’t feel like it was worth but after some thinking I realized it’s good to have this to look back on next year and more years to come.

I’ll be breaking this into different parts for better digestion and you can read on what interests you :)

Personal Life

This year has been all about learning new ideas to get myself in a proper standing. There was the desire to pick up making art again this year but that proved harder to do than I thought. Finding another way to express my thoughts has also proved futile. Carrying that on to next year.

If there was one lesson I learned this year, it would be that acknowledgement of your actions is a wonderful and great first step to fixing your issues. We tend to perform without thinking of why we do these things and how they’re affecting other people. Moving blindly like this is harmful to yourself and those around you. As such, investing in your mental health, be it by meditating, taking time for introspection or therapy, is a very important action that could save you from spiraling and hurting everyone around you.

Met a lot of great people this year and they were such interesting experiences. Working on my covnersational skills is something I believe would be a very essential skill in the coming skills because if you dont use it you lose it!

Professional Life

This year has been a rather stable year in terms of my professional career. Taking as many chances as I possibly could to teach myself a thing or, trying as best as I can to talk to the CTO to learn a tip or two and ask for his input on topics. Having the opportunity to report straight to the CTO when I had questions has really shown me how much people are willing to help you, especially when it is seen that you’re putting in the work yourself. This year one of the coolest things I’ve been able to do was rewriting the css of the entire codebase to make use of Stitches CSS to eliminate FOUC from the site, which was affecting the user experience. Being trusted to handle this alone really built my confidence with decision making and made me have more assertion over the codebase. NewComma really is more than a place I work at and I’m more than blessed to have the people I do at the helm of this project and the passion and drive behind the whole thing is so beautiful.

Projects

2023 was really a year of projects for me. Lucky for me, my weekends aren’t coupled and I have some free time to work on my lingering thoughts and cool things I’ve thought about. Here’s a list:

MailPigeon is one project I’m extremely proud of and its still wild to me that I actually built this with my own fingers and mind, of course with some council from some the coolest engineers ever!.

The idea for MailPigeon started because, having to do agency work RGO, I tend to deal with contact / feedback forms a lot. Depending on the scope of the project, we go with a CMS or a custom solution will have to be built out and having to create muliple backends for each and everyone of them got tiring at a point and I got to pondering how I could cut out that work for my sake and everyone else. I ended up coming up with the idea for a developer tool where you can create your form fields and get an endpoint along with an api key where you could use on your frontend and freely submit your forms to.

It later occured to me that that does not exactly fully embody the project. Then decided to build a form builder on top of this. Why? Because Google Forms feels like like a 2007 printer and Typeform is way too expensive. Also, why not!?

FluffyShelf was an idea that originated from Sebastian one tipsy night when we were talking about the value of books and how cool it would be to have a place for book lovers to keep an online catalogue of books they read and match with other people who shared their taste as well. His design skills coupled with my engineering skills, we made it happen and built it out. After building it out we realized a very huge problem and that was we built it for ourselves. The app was great but becuase we were the ones looking at it. We then decided to take a step back and look at it from a broader perspective. Do people who read books tend to keep a list of the books they read? Do they like to share those lists with people? How do they acquire these books? Do they need help connecting to people who can help them acquire these books? There questions and a whole lot more were topics for discussion. At the end of the day is was decided that we step away from the project a little bit and come back to it when the time was right for proper execution

As product owners and managers, it’s essential that you know how your product is doing, what parts of it are getting traction and which are not. Tracking track of drop-off rates and all that are things that people who care about their business do not take lightly at all. Because tools like MixPanel and MetaBase exist but the issue with these platforms is that they’re highly technical and setting them up, as a non-technical person, could be hell for you. I along with my wonderful co-founder and friend Agatha Ambrose decided to work on a project, called Hoprun, where users could interact with their product databases using AI. By using prompts, you can spin up a dashboard to look at exactly what you need to look at, cutting out a chunk of your time and as a product owner you know how valuable your time is!

Side Projects

I’ve had the pleasure on working on some itty bitty projects with my friends over the year and they were pretty interesting challenges. One of them was Ibis, a macos journaling app that I had a hand in with Casprine. Another of which is Mound, a raycast extension that was inspired by Pile, a macos electron app by Udara Jay. It was quite interesting as it was my first try at open source contribution. I also started a project called CV Mason, a project that would help people build out their CV. This project was planned to be a full-blown project with payment tiers and all but the planning was slowed down by unforeseen circumstances. That led to an interesting with Joel Anaman about Mande, a whole career-building project. The conversation held with him on the 25th of November at Code and Cocktails was one of the most insightful I’ve had in a long while. The level at which he broke down the simplest of processes down to step-by-step so tactically amazed me so much and believe me when I say I would love if someone like that would groom and mentor me.

New Knowledge

I learnt a whole lot of new tech this year. Some of them are RabbitMQ which was by merit of David Manor, one of the coolest people (and engineers) I know!. Alleviating the burden on your api services is something I didn’t think would be important but at a point I got curious about what service workers were and that got me to wanting to understand microservices, how they work and what they existed for. Having to learn about message scheduling, consumer allocation and flow control was so enlighting that I considered moving exclusively to the backend path of engineering. Learning about Flow Control, I carried that knowledge to learning about the intricate nature of web servers and how they function and how they pick up data. This was the craziest rabbit hole ever!. To think its all TCP servers under the hood. dealing with buffers and my knowledge about Flow Control and non-blocking processes proved more than useful here.

Next Steps

This year has been a journey of learning and preparation for me. For my career it has been building up experience, stacking up on my technical knowledge and finding new challenges to tackle. For my mental health, I learned to believe in my own process, the ability to accept what is and make an active decision to work diligently towards what can be and having patience for the heat of the forge to would the treasure. 2023 has been such a wonderful year.

Next year of course I would do more learning. As this year has been about building a strong foundation, next year would be aiming to apply all what I’ve learnt this year to moving forward

Remember, all this work together for your good! Just believe in your effort and the higher power you serve. Till next year✌🏽