The year started on an 'I will be positive despite life falling apart' note for me. I had just completed an internship at Goldman Sachs and flunked my Paystack interview, so I was not in a good place mentally.
I was resuming my final year, and everyone knows the final year is not cheap in terms of frequent payments cropping up from God knows where, final-year project, and social activities.
I continued submitting job applications and one day, I got a LinkedIn text, asking if I was interested in working as a Python Backend engineer (at this point, I was conflicted on whether to fully pivot into DevOps or stick to the backend and take on basic DevOps tasks like setting up deployment pipelines etc). I accepted the offer, and as is typical of most Nigerian startups, I was expected to start pushing code from day one. What came off as a rude shock to me, was the unhealthy work environment, needless to say, I got sacked a day after I told management that I had to rush my brother to the hospital, and couldn't work for the rest of the day. Lol, the team lead still asked me 'What did you work on yesterday?', during standup, lol.
After I was sacked, I got involved in the SCA Cloud School program, this was the nudge I needed to fully transition into the DevOps space. Thanks to God, I was among the top 8 or so graduates and got the opportunity to interview for an intern position with Deimos Cloud. I aced my interview and performed well at my now-ended internship placement.
I'm grateful for the time I spent with the folks at GlueOps, working on adding features to improve their GitOps deployment workflow. Thanks to the team, I contributed to a custom GitHub, which can be found in GitHub's marketplace.
I also graduated from the University of Lagos, Department of Geosciences - Geophysics, after spending seven (7) years on a five (5) year course. I am grateful for the gift of student communities, internship opportunities, people who gave me a chance to work with them even while I was a student, my mentors, colleagues, friends and fans.
I'm thankful for the speaking opportunities I got and the connections I made:
Panellist at GIZ International Day of the Girl Child
Speaker at Tech Stylers Evolve conference
Panellist at the Afara Initiative Transitions Mentorship Program
Hands-on demo session with Cloudadore
Speaker at GDG Ikorodu
Special shoutout to the folks at NITHUB, Unilag. Thank you Dr. Odumuyiwa (Director), for the opportunities and experiences the hub exposes me to. As I journey into the next phase of my life (post-undergrad), I'm excited for what the future holds. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "It's not the destination, it's the journey". My biggest takeaway is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, 'Do what you can, with what you have, where you are'.
You can keep up with exciting stuff I'd be doing via my LinkedIn. Also, please keep an eye out for the noble work my friends at Arete are doing.
Cheers to good fortune.