This post started off more like an earworm during my flight from South Africa -> Netherlands just a few days ago. There’s been this sudden urge to write about how the year has been or it could just be the free time on my hands after being laid off. Either way, it’s been a long year and there’s so much to say.

Personal life

Let’s kick things off from the personal side of things, I entered the year with a stable job and the fresh opportunity to relocate to the Netherlands. Moving my whole life to the Netherlands was never really on my to-do list but after talking to a few friends, it felt like a natural next step. At the very least I could always come back home if things didn’t go well. In hindsight, best decision I’ve made this year.

It’s been so good, I’ve decided to permanently live here. What a twist right? Most people, even the Dutch, complain about the cold and whilst it’s understandable, I seem to like it. Not the freezing negative-degree weather but having lived in Ghana, my skin is thankful for some good cold.

Like in all good stories, there are some buts and unfortunately, the food here stays top of my ‘but’ list. Dutch cuisine can be summed up as cheese, bread, and raw meat, only saved by their diverse collection of restaurants serving foreign cuisines. Getting local Ghanaian ingredients has been a hassle and my love for cooking has dwindled with the hassle. I do occasionally whip up something here and there but I’ve generally resulted to eating out and ordering in.

What the Netherlands lacks in good local food, it makes up for in all sorts of incredible things like legalized weed, good internet, and good transport systems among others. While some of my old hobbies and habits have died out, I’ve been able to pick up new ones. I recently started collecting vinyls and it’s a very pleasant experience. I’m currently collecting jazz vinyls the most, everything from Miles Daves to South African Jazz. Shoutout to 3345, they’ve put me on some amazing records and exceptional customer service.

Talk of trying to live here permanently, I decided somewhere in Q3, to buy a house and potentially renovate. The process of going on funda to find a house I wanted, to having the keys to the house took less than 3 months, and I didn’t even have to make a deposit or leave my house except for viewings. As I said, the Netherlands has working systems. Take that Ghana.

Moving to the Netherlands also means free roam across Europe. I still don’t think I’m a big travel person but that’s the beauty of Europe, you don’t have to be, another country is just a train away. So far I’ve seen Belgium(Antwerp, Gent), the South of France and Iceland. I threw in South Africa and Qatar. Traveling also opened up my photography skills, something I would be exploring more of. I have a photography blog in progress but for now, you can check my unsplash here. I mostly shoot with a FujiFilm XT-5 but I’m going to downgrade to a smaller form, currently evaluating the FujiFilm XPro-2 or XPro-3 and save to get a Leica Q series in the future.

Wrapping up on the personal side of things, I also discovered a plethora of fine-line tattoo artists and managed to get my first ink. I must say I do love it and I’ve been daydreaming about the next ones to get. I have Wotan written in Cabinet font on my left hand with an enclosing small arm band. The perfect blend of design and my love for Norse lore.

Work life

Looking back, this year has been a slope of proud product work, imposter syndrome and a treasure trove of unrealized ideas. On the work side of things, I led efforts of building a multi-tenant design system, helped launch a rebrand project, played around with Algolia, and experimented with AST and codemods.

I wrote a bunch of POCs and a few of them managed to land in production like a multi-tenant identity frontend platform using Astro. I realized I had the most fun building design systems and working on developer tooling, something I hope to focus more on in 2024.

I also had the opportunity to help maintain the frontend for an open finance platform and helped refine and maintain a design system for the product. I led an app-builder revamp project, something similar to the Plaid app builder, and built a new experience for how companies interact with their customers’ financial products.

On the side project side of things, David joined SundayStudio, the tiny design studio I started with Jon to help build out ideas. We’ve mostly been working on a trip planner app and looking forward to getting it to testflight next year. My roommate Griffith and I have also been toying with the idea of starting a startup of sorts and after a few months of talking, we recently started to work on a dating app. Dating in a new country brings up all sorts of issues and we decided to do something about it. Our goal is to help people make real connections and move away from the current cultural norm. Griffith made a post on twitter and got a few interested people to join on the adventure.

Ike managed to convince me that using Kotlin Multiplatform would be the ideal way to go. I’m more of React Native fan but this presents an interesting challenge and a chance to write Kotlin for the first time. It also didn’t help that Griffith is convinced using native platforms is the best way to go, he’s wrong btw. Regardless, I would be writing about my experience writing both Swift and Kotlin.

My major side project this year would be Ibis, a local-first note taking app. It kicked off from wanting to test out Tauri and lexical for a WYSIWYG editor. It has now turned into a fully blown-up note-taking app which I’ve using daily for the past few months. Building for yourself is an interesting way to learn, perhaps the most productive way. Over the course of working on the app, I’ve built a mini design system, written rust code to handle the reading and writing of files locally, and fundamentally improved my design skills. I’m currently building a highlights feature that allows you to document and save important moments of your life.

I need this mainly because I mostly forget things easily and documenting them seems to be the best way to help my brain out. This would also serve as the perfect hub for my work achievements. I’ve had problems in the past recollecting work achievements during performance reviews. I currently have a worklog I update weekly.

The idea stems from this blog post by Gergely Orosz on keeping a detailed log of work. Highlights would allow me to keep track of both my personal and professional achievements in one place, local, organized, and searchable. I currently post updates on twitter and it should be available for download in the first quarter of Q1, with a mobile companion soon after that. I would also be writing about the technical challenges on this blog on the features I build and the compounding bugs I envietably create.

2024

Remember I mentioned I was laid off, well the first priority of 2024 is to get a new job, one that equally challenges me and create a good avenue for growth. If you are looking for a software engineer who can double as your design engineer, don’t hesitate to reach out. I am also going to continue writing, ideally a few posts every months. I have a few technical topics I would like to talk about and have draft content for. One the side of projects, I would be mainly focusing on Ibis, the dating app Kompass and the travelapp at SundayStudio.

I have also been meaning to make a photo storage and CDN app, something akin to this photo blog by Sam Becker, ideally hosted on Fly using Cloudflare’s R2 platform. This would serve as storage for my photos mainly with mini server to power my website. Maybe I might open source it after I get a working version.

There’s also the idea of exploring new programming languages to build tools & services. Currently looking at Elixir and OCamal (&ReScript) for building fullstack applications and Go for backend services. I would also like to read more in the next year with no strict guidelines on the number. At least one non technical book every few weeks will defintely do me some good.

On the personal side of things, I’m looking forward to designing and furnishing the house, traveling & sharing more photos, getting a few more inks, cooking and biking across Schiedam.

There are few expectations on the goals and things I wanna do in the coming year. Some would change, some would evolve and some might never get done, that’s the reality of it all. Let’s gather here again in 12 months to evaluate it.

Peace.