Year In Review - 2020 Part One

This is a review of the first half of 2020. Months January until June.

It was my last semester in my five year undergraduate program studying Software Engineering. On the last semester the main thing we work on is the final (and big) project to conclude our studies. The semester kicked off; we started taking classes and my team started working on our project. I asked for a leave at my workplace until I finished the project since it was taking up most of my time.

My team and I started researching, discussing with our advisor and implementing parts of our project.

It was the beginning of March when the first cases of COVID-19 were found in my country. Almost everything came to a halt. Classes were cancelled, University was closed in a couple of weeks, and students went back to their homes.

Classes did not continue online since internet access is an issue in different parts of Ethiopia.

However, our team decided to continue working on our project and collaborating online since we had internet access. That too stopped in April when we needed to test things locally (or with low latency).

I got back to Alama and started working. I worked on three projects: Blue Dot Sessions, Talk In Arabic, and Meaningful Gigs. During these projects I mainly dealt with Design Systems, Refactoring, and organizing shared code, CSS, and components for frontend. I gained a stronger grip on React, CSS, SVG, and thinking about projects on a higher level.

I have been trying to read non-fiction books. The most interesting books I read in the past 6 months were Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Reading Rich Dad Poor Dad left me curious about a multitude of topics. So I took this Personal Finance course by Andrew Hingston, which answered a lot of my questions and gave me a much appreciated perspective. I found the /r/PersonalFinance sub-reddit wiki an interesting resource even though I did not go through everything.

One thing I kept on putting on the back-burner but I really wanted to ship was my personal site (this site). I had postponed working on it because of various and seemingly unending reasons. I had previously designed and built some parts of the site about a year ago.

This time, when I started working on it, I ended up changing up most of the design. I had gotten better at JavaScript, CSS, and writing code in general after a year of working on various projects so I rewrote most of the code as well. It was fun!

I wrote the site using

• Gatsby (a flavor of React)
• Styled-Components to organize and write my CSS
• Framer-Motion to animate things
• Markdown to write my posts.

If you’re interested, I have written a more detailed post on how I built the site.

Ending note: There were weeks where the state of the country, the world, and everything was extremely stressful. For being halfway done, 2020 had so much bad news. There were many times it was hard to get motivated to do much of anything. I feel extremely lucky and fortunate to be able to work as much as I have.