December, 22 2019

A Recap Of 2019 (CODE19)

This is my first time of writing a blog post on what I achieved for the year so let me go straight to the point.

I started the year with a list of things to focus on and I tagged it CODE19.

C - Contents | O - Open Source | D - Devops | E - Engineering | 19 - 2019

Content

This year I was able to publish more content than the previous year. I finished building my blog and published my first post on the 12th of October. I was able to publish 10 blog posts within 3 months (this inclusive) and the blog has attracted over 3.6k readers with 5.7k page views within this 3 months.

After I launched my blog I started sending out weekly newsletter focused on PHP & Laravel framework. I have sent out #11 newsletters so far and my email list has grown to 40 subscribers.

Open Source

I got involved with the open source community with one goal in mind - to give back to the community.

I participated in this year's Hacktoberfest with 7 pull requests. I made a total of 18 pull requests to 8 repositories(some are private) this year.

I also published 3 Laravel packages.

  • Lite Blog - a minimal full (frontend & backend) blog generator.
  • Paystack Lite - Fastest Way To Setup Paystack Checkout Form In Your Laravel Application
  • Tertiary Institutes - A database schema, models and controllers for list of Nigerian tertiary institutions.

Devops

I don't really know much about devops but I got my hands on lots of servers this year.

I did lots of setups for repository pipelines and setup auto deploys. I also wrote an article about "Zero Downtime Deployment With Bitbucket".

I got my hands on docker in one of our secret project in my workplace. Here is a sample dockerized Laravel app I pushed to Github. You can fork it and follow the documentation on the readme file.

Engineering

I started this year with a goal not to write just code but a maintainable codebase. I read a lot of articles on software engineering and a few books with regards to PHP and Laravel.

Two areas that have really improved in my coding life includes: naming things and writing tests.

I also published a blog post on testing - Mocking And Testing PHP Traits In A Laravel Application

A few things I learnt this year I implemented them at Qwickapge where I worked as the CTO for 1 year. Currently I am working onsite at Deacons Digital Solutions and also as a freelancer.

Meetups, Conferences & Talks

This year I attended 8 developers events, spoke at 3 and was a core organizer of one of them (LaravelPHP Onitsha).

Highlights

I have seen the importance of being part of a community and that's why I decided to be part of every community activities around me. By God's grace I will be more involved in it come 2020.

Side Projects

I started this year without having any project in mind but as time went on I got some inspiration and turned them into side projects.

Two side projects I worked were my blog and Litehost. You already know about my blog so let me talk about Litehost.

Litehost

Litehost is basically a reseller platform that provides web hosting services to individuals, small businesses and organizations. We offer Linux shared hosting, WordPress hosting, domain name registration and transfer.

My vision for Litehost is to make it easier for developers to deploy their Laravel application on shared host. Currently we have not achieved that but we have already made a lot of progress.

I will like to announce that Litehost will be ready to start accepting customers on the 24th of December 2019.

Conclusion

So that's all that happened this year. I am still putting down my plans for next year(2020) which will focus on building Litehost into a profitable company, publishing more contents on this blog, growing my local community and contributing to open source.

I know this is going to be hard because of my 8 to 5 job and my academic activities as a student but I am ready to face 2019 by the grace of God.

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