2020: A great year nevertheless

Alamu Benjamin
5 min readDec 31, 2020

2020 was definitely a full decade. From Covid to BLM down to #EndSars with a sprinkle of every other thing in between. We finally made it to the end. Daniel already summarized the whole of 2020 in this image.

My best image of 2020

The Overview

2020 was a major career highpoint for me as I doubt I would ever be able to match the amount of work I put in this year. From clocking 20-hour workdays to breaking production or scamming my way through demos(😂😂😂 don’t judge me, we all have done it), 2020 was one hell of a ride.

The year began with a bang as I continued in my role as a Software Engineer at Mylaw, began interning there in my final year, and just eased into a Fulltime Remote role. This definitely is my most rewarding and fulfilling role so far.

By the middle of January, I also joined Eko Innovation Center as a Software Engineer. Got the role after I doing some work for them in 2019 on a contract basis and also on the recommendation of Sola. Apart from IT this has been my only 9–5 role and let's just say I won't be accepting any 9–5 roles for the foreseeable future. Eventually had to leave in March/April due to Covid.

Before I could say Jack Robinson Hostville offered me an Engineering Manager role and I hopped on it, seemed like a dream role working with some of the best devs I could hope for building a couple of world-class solutions. Definitely, my most challenging role so far, spent the next 5 months chunking out solutions, managing teams, dealing with clients while also trying to maintain my sanity dealing with a once in a lifetime pandemic.

Somehow between all these tasks and my never-ending freelance gigs, I managed to stay sane. By the end of July decided it was time to leave Definitely proud of the work I put in here as we(a team of 4 )designed and architected 3 applications from scratch to production within 4 –5 months. Shoutout to Dapo, Moshood, and Tomide. Let's not do that kind of crash coding ever again, na only one life we get.

Joined C2G in the ember months after leaving Hostville and it has been a great ride. Still pretty new there but I already enjoy it, the entire tech team issa vibe. Can’t wait to release a couple of awesome stuff we have in the pipeline

The Positives

  • Led full-scale Engineering teams for the first time
  • Became a more rounded developer. Polished my Backend skills also picked up DevOps along the way
  • Got scammed by a couple of companies. I count this as a positive because the entire experience set me up for better things
  • Making amazing friends(So so so many).
  • Became more confident in my skills as a developer and as a person
  • Changed my dead-ass laptop (I can hear Daniel and Christian’s laughter in the background already
  • Made serious career growth.
  • Deployed 13 applications to production, and another 7 are in the pipeline and should all go live in the 1st quarter of 2021. (A mix of office, contract, and personal projects)
  • Joined/Co-founded a couple of startups. Watch out for these in 2021
  • Met all my financial targets for the year
  • Found a semi-perfect work-life balance
  • Got to work with some of the people I look up to
  • Found out that apparently, I have a mumu button

The Negatives

Can’t really think of any, personally, I see setbacks as setups for greater things. Might sound cliche but it has always worked for me. No reason to change a working method right?

Babe?

Kehade, Segun, and Ayoola would be pretty interested in this. Daniel inspired this section

I leave you with the wise words of Ekene

The Biggest Lessons

  • GOD >>>>>>>>>>>>>
  • I learned the value of time and money
  • Wahala be like bicycle.
  • Problem no dey finish, try chop life small

2021?

The same thing we do every year, try to make the new year 10x better than the last. Hopefully, I can do more open source work, finally find something interesting to do outside code, Football, and Netflix. Would also love to mentor a couple of people (Need to convince myself that I am ready to mentor sha). Hopefully, bag that elusive remote jobs.
2020 was one hell of a year but we gonna make 2021 even better

2021 in a tweet

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