A Recap of 2023

I have been doing my yearly review since 2019 but last year was different because I didn't do it. But I am ready to do it again so let's jump in!

Books Read

Among the most impacful of the books I read this year is Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. The second book is How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.

Here is a comprehensive list of books I read this year:

• Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
• Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.
• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne.
• Fooled by Randomnes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
• Thnking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
• How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
• Welcome, Holy Spirit by Benny Hinn.
• Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Suby.
• Side Hustle by Chris Guillebeau.

Professionally

It 3 years already since I started working on the Pay4Me App.

Here are a few milestones we achieved this year:

• Our customer base grew by over 89% that is from 6k to 69k users.
• Processed over 1,440 school fees for customers across 28 countries.
• Partnered with Paystack & Pawapay which enabled our collections in local currencies.

Open Source

The only package I published this year is Filament Feature Flags which a plugin for Filament admin panel.

• Featured on the official Laravel News website.
• Over 50 stars on GitHub.
• Downloaded over 200 times from packagist.

Publishing

My personal webiste which also has a section for my articles got a fresh look.

I published 7 articles which were all focused on Laravel developers that host their applications on cPanel.

Litehost Webhosting

This year was a bit challenging for Litehost, we had to deal with moving from different infrastructure providers due to server downtime and cost.

But we finished the year strong. We are now fast and more stable with a very active customer support team.

Here are some of our milestones:

• 150 new customers.
• Completed 349 order.
• Over 5.3M in revenue which is an average of over N400k every month.

PHP Community (PHPTalks)

Laravel PHP community got into a merger with PHPTalks, and we have decided to build and support the PHP community in Nigeria together.

• We had an event in Uyo which was graced with over 200 attendees.
• Over 700 community members.
• Over 400 Twitter followers.
• Over 10 virtual sessions.

Personal

• I still maintained my spiritual commitments to God and in church.
• I got wedded to a beautiful woman that I love so much.
• And I taught her how to drive.
• And we built our first house this year.

Looking Into 2024

I have a lot of goals and expectations for the year 2024, and they include:

• Attend Laracon US
• Organise more local PHP meetups and conferences.
• Read more books on finance, psychology and parenting.
• Contribute more to open-source.
• Publish more articles.