2021: Year In Review

· 2339 words · 11 minute read

In this post, I reflect on the year 2021 and explore the possibilities 2022 offers.

I haven’t written a year in review before because I’ve found them to require too much effort, but I want to do more challenging things this year, so why not start with this?

Work and Life 🔗

I moved to Dublin in January last year and got depressed for two months. Thinking back, I found the move incredibly hard: I didn’t know anyone in Dublin, and the country was in lockdown when I arrived. I’d look out the window or step out to buy groceries, and it’ll look like a ghost town.

Depression was shocking for me; it primarily manifested as a lack of motivation to do anything and an unwillingness to socialize. Thankfully, my manager saw the signs early and pointed me in the right direction. I had eight weeks of therapy, and the sessions were beneficial. Today, I’ve made lots of friends, and we do things together regularly.

After that episode passed, I fully settled into my work life. I worked on a lot of challenging problems last year, and the work of my colleagues and I culminated in the launch of Cloud Filestore’s Enterprise tier .

My job also allows me to pursue some of my other interests, which I find very fulfilling. For example, I participated in (and won) a logo competition. I also organized a BGN Hackathon with a great team, and this year we got the most participation from students in Nigeria ever - I hope this increases even more next year!

In 2022, I look forward to working on even more challenging problems I care about.

Faith 🔗

For those who don’t know, I am a Christian. In 2021, I spent a lot of time reading my bible and asking God questions. As a result, I got clarity on many things and joined a great church.

In 2022, I’ll continue to ask questions, walk in faith and share some things I learn.

Data Structures and Algorithms 🔗

In 2021, I was interested in teaching Data Structures and Algorithms (DSAs). I invested a lot of time into learning DSA fundamentals, so I believed there was some value I could offer. My two main motivations were to:

  • help people become better software engineers by making them formally aware of DSAs as a toolbox for problem-solving
  • help people pass coding interviews

I taught two cohorts - 8 people in total - between March and April. The first cohort was five weeks long, and the second was seven weeks long. The schedule was something like this:

  • teach the cohort about X structure or Y algorithm in a general class every weekend (from this project)
  • set personal problem-solving goals for each person for the week
  • meet 1:1 with each member of the cohort every week to find out about their progress and if they need any extra help

The format was very personal because I know people learn in different ways and struggle with different things; I believe this structure helped the members get the best value from the time we spent together. This belief is backed by statistics, too - members from the cohorts got offers from Mantium AI, Booking.com, Bloomberg, and Microsoft afterwards. And these are the only ones I know about!

This program has been successful due, in no small part, to the help I got from some friends. One of them volunteered to teach a cohort for seven weeks, and another took a lesson on Maps for one of the cohorts I managed. I am very grateful to both of them.

It wasn’t all roses, though. We had a lot of dropouts, especially for the last cohort - some reasons were legitimate and others not as much (in my opinion). A high rate of dropouts is demotivating for someone who has decided to commit time for X number of weeks for free.

For the future, I’m thinking about two things. One: How can I work with more volunteers to make this even more ubiquitous? Many people showed interest after this tweet, so I think I’ll reach out. Two: How can we decrease the rates of dropouts in the program?

I’m happy to talk to anyone that would like to work with me as a community manager for this program!

Side Projects 🔗

In 2021, I worked through side projects extremely slowly. I’ll give myself a pass, though: I moved to a new country, struggled with depression for a few weeks and devoted a lot of my time to teaching!

Some projects I worked on include:

  • Data-Structures-All-Langs: a project with an ambitious vision to implement data structures in every language possible. I have a lot of pull requests open, and this year I want to do a better job of working through them.
  • Qategorize: a Twitter bot to save tweets in categories. I built this because Twitter bookmarks are annoying, and searching through DMs is annoying. I worked with Azeez Elegbede (Frontend) and Tere Sagay (Design). I’ve lost the motivation to work on this project, but I want to see it through. It’s maybe 95% complete, so I need to settle down and get it done. It’s described in detail by Tere in her portfolio.
  • Go-Notion: a simple lib to build programs with Notion’s APIs.
  • ayomideoyekanmi.com: a repository for my thoughts and pursuits.

In 2022, I want to work through projects faster.

Birthday 🔗

My birthday was extremely fun in 2021. I made a tweet about wanting a presentation from my friends on topics that excite them, and they surprised me by making them. The presentations covered a lot of themes, highlighting the diversity in our friend group, including social media, k dramas, mythology, pole dancing, pageantry and food.

My primary motivation was this: you feel a wonder when you can see people talk about things they are genuinely passionate about. You hear the extent they have gone to research. You hear how much they have thought about it. It’s a feeling I can’t explain, and I’m eternally grateful for the inspiration I felt possessed by after my birthday.

Blogging 🔗

Last year, I published two posts.

The first one, titled “On Getting Into Google”, was a phenomenon. Today, it has been viewed over 27,000 times. It has gotten featured in multiple newsletters. So many people reached out (and continue to reach out) to me to let me know that my story helped them remain strong through tough interview seasons. Some people found the motivation to keep trying. Others found the courage to start applications again after a long time. I’m grateful for the impact of the essay!

The second post, a postmortem review published on the last day of the year, is close to my heart because it was preceded by something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time: build a blog (this website). The blog is a Netlify-hosted Hugo static site powered by a theme I created with some help. Making this blog only took two days, and it reminded me again that some things only look complex on the outside.

Here’s a design I made for my blog in Excalidraw, and the final result is this site. Pixel perfect engineer lomo.

Blog Designs

Mentorship & Talks 🔗

In addition to teaching the DSA cohorts in 2021, I also took on a mentee through a formal mentorship program. My main goals were to provide career guidance and supervise a project (requirements gathering, design & development) my mentee was working on. The mentorship program lasted for eight weeks - it went well, and we still maintain a relationship. Mentoring this way is hard for me, though, so I don’t know if I’ll do it again.

In terms of talks, I spoke on a Twitter Spaces hosted by Joojo - he’s a good host, so keep an eye out for his next one; an IG Live hosted by Ewere & Fisayo for NACOSS CU; and a Zoom call with NACOSS UI. I mostly spoke about my journey to Google and my SRE role in these talks, and I’m happy to keep having them.

Next year, I have a goal to give a talk at a tech event about a topic I care about; I’m taking the first step in that direction by applying to Open Source Community Africa(OSCA).

Learning 🔗

This year I pursued some non-SWE interests I have:

  • I participated in Ovalay’s UX Course. I learned a lot about design theory. I learned best practices for building interfaces and how to critique designs. The final step in the program is to create a case study, but I haven’t been able to get to it yet. Hopefully, I will do that soon. Thanks to Leslie and his crew.
  • I enrolled in swimming classes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I won’t drown in open water now :).
  • I took some guitar lessons on my own and made some progress, but I think the next step for me here is to pay for an instructor. I want to get a formal re-education on music theory, and I’d like to have a community.

Reading 🔗

I didn’t finish most of the books I started to read last year. One reason for this is that I take extensive notes (my understanding + extra footnotes) for almost everything I read, which slows me down significantly. So, going forward, I’m thinking about reading differently.

There are some books (and articles) I will not take notes for - ones I don’t care about deeply. These materials will only expand my knowledge borders, so I know what’s possible in the world. Next, there are some books (and articles) I will make shallow notes for - these are ones that I care about but can’t commit time to at the moment. The main reason for this is that I tend to go on spirals when I dig into something, and when I don’t have time to dig into a concept I' ve found in these materials, it slows my progress. So I want to make more room for unknowns - more room for things I don’t know about and can’t find out about…yet. And the final category is things I will make deep notes about. These will be things that feel urgent to me at the moment.

Another reason I didn’t finish a lot of books was that I didn’t have a schedule most of the time for reading. I want a schedule for reading this year. And, the final reason is that I dump books I lose interest in; I’ll continue to do this judiciously. Life is too short to read uninteresting books.

Here are some books I read (mostly partially) in 2021:

  • The Cyber Effect by Dr Mary Aiken
  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  • Site Reliability Engineering by Google
  • Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
  • Algorithms Illuminated: Part 1: The Basics by Tim Roughgarden
  • SSH Mastery by Michael Lucas
  • Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian
  • Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Here are some books I plan to read (partially) this year:

  • A lot from last year since there are largely unfinished
  • Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Brian Christian
  • Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom

Lessons 🔗

I can’t remember all the lessons I learned, and I can’t share all of the ones I do. But, here are some I can share:

  • Mental health is essential. Everything else in your life suffers if your mental health suffers, so take it seriously. Get help if you need it.
  • A routine is vital for productivity, so make one. And make one you actually like to follow.
  • Multiple interests can make life a bit overwhelming. So, two things:
    • Some things require complete short-term focus (e.g. build X program), and some require a more long-term strategy( e.g. chess). Make the separation.
    • You’ll need to prioritize because you can’t do everything. Better to do one thing well than to do nine shabbily.
  • Motivating yourself is hard. Negative reinforcement as a fuel for motivation may work for a while, but it’s not sustainable. Positive reinforcement is much, much better.
  • Learn to negotiate with yourself. It’s essential to get to a point where you can take actions consistently because you’ve decided they are important.
  • In everything you do, give your best.

Goals for 2022 🔗

I think I’ve had a mission statement implicitly for as long as I can remember, and it helps guide the things I choose to do (or not) throughout the year; however, I got the idea to formalize it from Julia Evans. So, in 2022, I look to pursue knowledge and reify my ideas by building and sharing things along the way.

Here are a few concrete goals that will help implement this mission

  • Build my versions of existing tech. Building helps me learn, so I want to be more daring with the things I build. Particularly, I’m looking to write an interpreter and build my version of Redis.
  • Write more. And faster. I have a few ideas for posts I’d like to make, and most are centred around “here’s how X works”, “I built Y, and this was my process”, “I faced this Z technical challenge, and J helped me”. Some others are less technical and focus on my thoughts on a topic. I’m looking to embrace all these sides of myself.
  • Give my first talk. I’m going to apply to OSCA soon. So hopefully, that works out.
  • Build out the DSA program. I have a few ideas here, but nothing concrete yet. I know for sure that I need to collaborate to make this work.
  • [Redacted]

I’m grateful to all the people that made 2021 worthwhile and to God for being my strength. 2022 will be awesome. On that note, I wish you a happy new year!