2017: The End


Enter Galactic

Enter Galactic by Kid Cudi

It’s the 1st of January, 2017. Our hero is sitting down on his bed in a small room in VI writing his plans for the new year. He’s not confident of achieving any of them, heck he’s already stressed out by the fact that he’s going to be in Uyo for the next 10 months… but he writes anyway.

His superpower is overthinking things, and he’s on max power. As he thinks, he falls into a deep but psychedelic state to escape the prison of his reality1. He discovers he’s in the future, 365 days after. He sees how his plans played out. This is a narration of the goals he set:


1. Increase monthly income and start earning internationally

This is the one he’s most proud of. His earning power increased much more than he could have even guessed, thanks to a combination of investments, freelancing, salaries, and writing. Even though he couldn’t accurately calculate how much he earned as it came in various places, a look at his invoices and some bank statements told him that he had made more money than ever before. Not bad.

His friends contributed a lot to these earnings. Yomi helped him a lot with writing. Wale recommended him for a great job. Ebuka showed him the ropes with Crypto. He has great friends!

2. Launch Erxia

The story of Erxia is one of legendary procrastination. Erxia is a company he registered late in 2016. It was supposed to house all his hardware experiments and moonshot projects. He had earlier planned and documented a lot about it in 2016, but for some reason, he still did not execute in 2017. He knows he’s passionate about the ideas he has for Erxia and hopes that 2018 is the year these ideas come to life.

3. Blog a lot about random issues

There’s always one on the list that you totally flunk. This may be that one for him. Even though he was able to write a lot more than previous years, he didn’t write much about his thoughts on non-coding things. He managed to set up a blog for that reason though, at least that’s a step in the right direction. Maybe 2018 is the year he utilizes the blog properly. We’ll be hopeful, for his sake.

4. Become an expert in JavaScript, Python, PHP, and C. In that order

Hahaha. Well, ‘expert’ was always pretty optimistic, but he did improve a whole lot in these languages. Especially in the order he specified. He works with Node.js almost every day now, and can hold his own pretty well on Frontend projects (thanks ES6, Angular, and Vue). He even started learning React late in the year.

He was also able to build apps and APIs in Python with Flask (Flask is the greatest)!

5. Attend more fellowships and church services

He was able to do this, thanks to a new friend he made – Dami. They found a beautiful church in Uyo and enjoyed going there every Sunday. It’s the thing he misses most about the city of Uyo.

6. Impact 20 people positively

He’s not sure he could quantify the impact he made. But here are some things he did to help people:

  • Started a coding study group (Prometheus Alpha) to help people learn Fullstack engineering for free. About 8 people were active members of the group, and a couple of them have good coding jobs today! It’s another big thing he’s proud of!
  • Mentored 2 brilliant university students in embedded engineering at the University of Uyo. They had a couple of sessions together where they discussed robotics, IoT and embedded engineering in general. They were able to start a project together, and he still keeps in contact with them.
  • He wrote a bunch of tutorials on various websites (Sitepoint, Pusher, and LogRocket) and was able to talk to people one-on-one or via emails about their careers in coding. The feedback he has seen has been super encouraging.

7. Have at least X in savings

He was able to beat his savings goal, even though he spent a lot! He’s just lucky he made a lot more.

8. Read 20 books

Unfortunately, he was only able to read 14 books. His favorite among these were Eloquent JavaScript, Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, the Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.

He was very picky about books this year, he started many he didn’t finish cause he didn’t enjoy them.

9. Launch kickass side projects

He was able to launch Worklogs! A product used by a ton of teams around the world. It took some hard work between him and Yomi, but it was worth it. He also laid the foundation for Cultured, an app he’s really pumped about, and has started working on with Dayve and Yomi. He somehow still found the time to work on some other interesting things with Ibiyemi and Jonathan. These are already done and will be released soon. He’s so excited about them.

He also watched Selar grow, thanks to Douglas! A particularly interesting memory he has is the remote Y Combinator interview the team had where they were joking around and talking about the YC partners. He’s grateful for growth, and for more opportunities in the future.

10. Become an intermediate bass and/or acoustic guitar player

He couldn’t get his new guitar at Uyo, so he just enjoyed the procrastination and decided to start again when he got back to Lagos. He knows you’re judging, he’s judging himself too.


Still in his trance, he realizes that even though the year had massive challenges, and a whole lot of shit-storms, at the end it wasn’t a total drag. It was the opposite of a total drag. He maybe lost the most important friendship he had at the beginning of the year, but he met a lot of other cool people along the way. He was able to start growing and became a lot more confident.

He wakes up and smiles. He’s grateful for the new year.