Back to all articles

2024 in Review as a Frontend Developer

Dec 31

via GIPHY

Table of contents


Introduction

Hi there! This year has been a whirlwind of challenges, growth, and achievements. Juggling my final year in school, a full-time job, and personal development was no easy feat, but looking back, I’m filled with gratitude for every milestone. 🎉 I decided to finally write and publish this post because of something I read in one of my favorite book — Atomic Habits. In a particular chapter the author differentiates between being in motion and taking action.

Here are some snippets from the book:

  • If you outline twenty ideas for articles you want to write, that’s motion. If you actually sit down and write an article, that’s action.
  • Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.
  • We decide to get in motion because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.
  • Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen.
  • That’s the biggest reason you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
  • ⁠Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done.

The moment I read this, I knew I actually needed to publish the post. For the past few months, I have just outlined a bunch of article ideas. I had a false sense of progress. I was just in motion but somehow, I never really took action.

So here’s me taking action. Finally! 🚀

Academic Milestone

I'd be starting with how grateful I am to God for an intense academic journey. I wrapped up my final exams in July, graduating with first class honors from the Department of Building, Obafemi Awolowo University. Achieving this while balancing other aspects of my life is a testimony of God's favour and help. Despite a very busy final year I decided not to take full pause on coding. From time to time, I still read a few articles from my favourite developers, practiced some code snippets and stayed in tune with frontend trends and news.

Full Time

In May, I landed my first full-time job as a Frontend Engineer in a fintech and Web3-based startup.The first few months were far from easy. I worked on multiple products simultaneously, tackled production bugs, and handled tight deadlines. These experiences, though tough, strengthened my resilience, problem-solving and communication skills. One of my proudest achievement was filling in for a backend developer in the organization I work for by creating a database with Google Sheets and conecting it to the frontend of an application. I majorly enjoyed working on refactoring about 20% of our large codebase for easier readability.

Portfolio Launch

Phew! Throughout the year, I had just been making plans (being in motion), without really taking action like I described in the introduction. I finally gathered my excuses, detonated them, and then did what I had been procrastinating all year. I found a good template I could work with, blocked out time amidst my overloaded schedule, and created something I could showcase to the world. Big thanks to Victor Eke for the inspiration. I strongly recommend if you're finding it hard creating a portfolio for yourself. Here are some of the tools/libraries/frameworks I used while building my portfolio site:

Courses I Took

Learn Nextjs by Vercel

Though I initially completed this course last year, I revisited it to deepen my understanding of Next.js. The concepts and techniques I learned played a crucial role in my daily work.

Zod

I decided to tackle my aversion to form validation and took Matt Pocock’s course on Total TypeScript. Zod, a lightweight schema declaration library, became my favorite tool for form validation. I shared all my code solutions and thought process publicly to stay accountable.

Beginners’ TypeScript

About two years ago, I never imagined I would be using TypeScript so much in my code. Now, it's a language I've grown to love and use. To refresh and reinforce my knowledge, I took this course from a TypeScript wizard I respect. Thank you Matt! 🙌🏿

Community Engagement and Open Source Contributions

A solo developer can do 10x. But a developer within a community of great developers would do 100x. This year, I've come to greatly cherish the power of a programming community. I became more active in well-respected JavaScript community by asking more questions when I needed help, assisted others when they needed help, discuss technologies, made friends, and of course I enjoyed listening to other developers argue about their favourite tools and techniques.

Also, this year I enjoyed contributing to open source projects. My biggest was contributing severally to the Neondb PostgreSQL tutorial page. The joy of seeing your PRs merged in an emerging technology is truly satisfying. 😊

Favourite tools

I used a lot of tools, libraries etc this year at work, and also for my personal projects. Here's list of my top tools/libraries/framework I really enjoyed using throughout the year.

Conferences

I was privileged to accompany my CEO to a Blockchain Conference in Lagos organized by Business Day. The theme was centered around harnessing blockain for economic and social transformations. It was a good opportunity to network and hear some of the big players in the industry. Another notable conference I attended was organized by the Ife Tech Community tagged Digital Discovery. I was honored to speak as a panelist at the conference about the use of AI tools while learning to code.

Happy New Year!!! 🎆

Aaaaaaaaand it's a wrap! I'd like to wish everyone a happy new year in advance. This year was a blend of challenges and triumphs. Every challenge pushed me to grow, and every triumph reminded me of what’s possible with determination and faith. Here’s to an even better 2025! Cheers to growth, collaboration, and serving the world through software. 🥂