I know, I know 🥲
I'm publishing this very very late....in the middle of January.
But better late than never, right? 😅
2023, a year it was... high moments, low moments, wins...and losses. But all in all, it was both a lesson and an experience that I learnt from.
I started the year by attending Flutter Forward, the first-ever event organized by the Flutter team in Africa. I learnt more about the new technologies coming up and connected with the Google team working in different teams, made new friends from different countries around the world and I grew my network. It was such an amazing experience!
I was honoured to meet Puf, Tim Sneath, Nohe, Nilay alongside other Google engineers who were in attendance 🔥
One of my highlights was visiting the Google office alongside other GDSC-lead alumnae from different countries in Africa. Auwal, our program manager, was our host during the visit
Moving on...
I had the chance to give a technical workshop at the Co-operative University of Kenya titled " Get to know compose and Firebase". Before I delivered this workshop, I figured that the terms 'Firebase' and 'Jetpack compose' were new to the audience and I completely switched my talk to beginner level-no prior experience.
I covered the topics around the console and different Firebase products and we finished it off with a codelab.
It was quite exciting for me to see that they're learning a very new concept through me and seeing them light up about the technologies warmed me up.
I also might have drawn them to the Android dev side 🤭 No bias 👀
I also had the privilege to be part of Infobip's second developer meetup in Africa. I gave a talk titled " Navigating the tech space as a student". I gave insights on how students can break into tech & jumpstart their careers.
When preparing this talk, I had a moment of reflection and I was able to see the path that I took as well as the things I did when I joined the industry during my freshman year on campus. I'm always glad for all the opportunities that I took which led me to where I am today as well as the lessons learnt & I'm always proud to share these insights with the community.
Here's the recap;
I also had the opportunity to give a talk at Strathmore University during Google I/O extended. This time it was a technical talk and I talked about " Revolutionizing your UI with Material 3". I am a very big fan of M3 and having the chance to give a talk about it was a major highlight.
I mostly talked about Material theming, generating colour themes, dynamic colour schemes and shapes in M3.
My final speaking engagement was at Riara University. I received an invite from the Dean to attend and deliver a talk alongside other speakers during their annual career day.
The theme was "Innovate & elevate: Navigating the future of tech careers". We, the speakers had the chance to talk about what the future holds for young innovative minds, exposing individuals to emerging technologies in the IT industry as well as how best they can utilize their skills.
Also, something great happened,
🥁🥁🥁Drumrolls, please 🥁🥁🥁
Victoria Mutai and I co-founded Firebase Kenya 🎆
We had the vision of bringing developers who use Firebase in their respective stacks to learn and grow together. We do this by conducting technical sessions as well as sharpening technical writing skills by allowing our members to write articles and publish them in the official blog. This will help them gain more technical knowledge and have an idea of how it's used and integrated with other stacks.
I'm very excited to see its growth 🥺
What didn't go right in 2023?....
Firstly, I missed an opportunity to give a talk at an international conference.
I was very happy at first to finally be on stage giving a talk beyond the Kenyan borders at plDroid, which was held in Warsaw, Poland. But why didn't I make it you may ask?....Did I decline? Did I cancel?
Neither of that happened. I missed the chance due to a visa rejection two weeks before the conference. I was really low since I put in all the effort in this talk so that I could have a world-class presentation just for it to be cancelled last minute. This has never happened before but I guess there's a first time for everything, both good and bad 🫠
Another thing that I struggled with in the previous year was consistency and maintaining a stable schedule. I also learnt that I am a victim of procrastination and the only way to beat this is by enforcing discipline in my schedule.
I also struggled to balance school, work, programs, and upskilling. One was overtaking the other and before you know it, the next thing you struggle with is burnout....also, burnout is no joke! I do not want to go through that again.
I also found myself doing very less of what I was doing, my online presence also was greatly reduced. This year I'm trying to go all out at the same time doing one thing at a time. By this I mean; more talks, more technical articles, repeat.
This is the end of my 2023 recap 😊 See you in the next end-of-year recap.
Parting shot;
"Life doesn’t always present you with the perfect opportunity at the perfect time. Opportunities come when you least expect them, or when you’re not ready for them. Rarely are opportunities presented to you in the perfect way, in a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. … Opportunities, the good ones, they’re messy and confusing and hard to recognize. They’re risky. They challenge you.”
~Susan Wojcicki (Former YouTube CEO)