Commit to Growth: My 2024 Reflection
Hey there! I want to share my incredible journey through 2024 – a year that tested my limits but also brought amazing growth in my tech career while finishing up university.
The Open Source Adventure Begins
I started my tech journey back toward the end of 2023, and let me tell you—balancing university with self-taught programming wasn’t a walk in the park! But 2024 kicked off with some exciting news: I got accepted into the Tublian open source internship program in January.
During my time with Tublian, I learned a valuable lesson about focus. Instead of jumping between different repositories, I concentrated on making meaningful contributions to just a few, including Apache and two others. This approach wasn’t random – it came from the amazing mentorship I received from the Open Sauced community. Huge shoutout to @Bekah, @Chrissy, @ayu, and @Jeffrey for teaching me that consistency beats quantity any day!
I even got to pay it forward by mentoring two newcomers to open source. We’d meet weekly on Google Meet and tackle problems together on Discord. The program wrapped up beautifully – I got my certificate and even landed in the top 3 of the writing competition!
After Tublian, I never stopped contributing to open source, to me;
“Open source is my playground.”
March brought another exciting opportunity when I joined the Chimoney ambassadorship program.
University Life: The Ultimate Juggling Act
2024 was my final year studying Biochemistry at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, and whew – talk about intensity! Picture this: I had to be in the lab by 8 AM sharp (and I mean sharp – even 8:01 AM would get you kicked out for the day!). We’d work until 7 PM, sometimes even until 10 or 11 PM, including weekends. There I was, running experiments solo with the lab rats, attending classes, doing practicals, giving presentations, and somehow keeping up with assignments.
The picture of one of my benchmark setups in the laboratory for an experiment.
My picture in one of the nights I stayed up in the laboratory collecting fractions for testing the effect of inhibitors on enzymes.
But did I let that stop my tech journey? Nope! Though I’ll admit – the burnout was real. Time management has always been my thing, but this pushed me to my limits.
The CS50 Sprint
In February, while scrolling through X(formally Twitter), I stumbled upon ProjectStake Academy’s CS50 program.
Here’s where it gets interesting – I got accepted but had to delay starting because of exams. When I finally joined, they were already on week 7 of 10!
A stroke of luck came when our department’s transformer broke down during exam period – no electricity meant no lab work. Instead of heading home, I stayed in my hostel (thankfully with 24/7 electricity!) and dove into CS50X. Thanks to an amazing TA who went above and beyond (weekend sessions, pair programming, you name it!), I caught up and completed the program with perfect scores in just 4 weeks!
The Final Push and New Beginnings
The second semester was intense – like, 10x intense. But exciting things kept happening! Our CS50 team (3 active members out of 4) built a Wallet DApp that took first place in the hackathon. I couldn’t even attend the final presentation because of a university commitment, but my teammates crushed it!
I wrote a blog post on my CS50X with ProjectStake. Check it out!
Despite the crazy schedule, I started #100DaysOfCode, coding for 2 hours every midnight. Made it to day 49 before exams hit. During this time, I reached out to Bekah on Discord when feeling burned out, and she gave me great advice about focusing on school first. Still, I kept my tech connection alive by reading at least one tech blog daily on daily.dev.
August brought an amazing opportunity – the ProjectStake Graduate Program. Though they initially wanted me to be a trainee assistant (TA) too, they understood when I explained about my upcoming exams. The program was incredible – studying computer science curriculum from University of Washington and Berkeley while doing a paid internship. I built reusable components using Tailwind and Phoenix-Elixir, from checkboxes to avatars.
During the internship (August-November), I still found time for Hacktoberfest, getting 8+ PRs merged, and even placed in the top 3 of the Block Open Source Hackathon for Goose AI Agent, which took place in November!
December brought my convocation, and I’ve jumped back into #100DaysOfCode since November 25th.I started the challenge a week before the end of my internship program. As I write this, I’m still going strong with the challenge.
Looking Ahead
2024 was wild, challenging, and absolutely transformative. Having completed my Biochemistry degree and with my growing experience in tech, I’m beyond excited to see what 2025 has in store as I pursue my career as a software engineer. Here’s to more coding, more learning, and more growth – both in my career and personal life!
This post was written in January 2025, reflecting on my journey through 2024.
This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
