From the Ashes We Will Rise.

A remarkable tale about what patience, agony and failure all amount to.

Gratitude 🙏🏽

I may not be where I want to be, but thank God I am not where I used to be — Joyce Meyer

I can’t express how grateful I am for being in the position I am, for the team that I have and for the opportunities I received this year. I don’t take it for granted that so many people are inspired by what I share in my articles and random sayings I bubble out when I speak.

I am grateful for the friends I made along the way, it was easier to bare some situations with y’all holding my hand. The memories will forever remain priceless.

Debt, Recruitment & Managing a Distributed Team.

It is not until you have been through a storm that you know how to really prepare for one.

Adi-loits got a new space and despite the urge to work from home, amidst a second lock down I was glad to spend most of my days at office. Honestly amidst the internet charges, disrupted work/life balance I honestly prefer this kind of separation.

This has been a year of transitioning, transformation and abundance. I was privileged to be involved in a couple of awesome projects both professionally and personally. I got to meet a couple of awesome engineers who have pushed my craft to a whole new level. I am blessed to have been given the opportunity to learn with some of really beautiful brains that we have.

I was assigned more responsibilities and spent quite a lot of time on managing overall projects, bridging the gap with clients as well as scaling some parts of the team.

Here’s what I learned;

• Progress is better than perfection; small incremental changes will definitely lead to a much better product.
• The more is not always the merrier; most often we think the more hands we have on a project the faster it will be done but that’s not always the case. At times it’s better and easier to stay small.
• One of the bitter lessons I had to pick up as a team lead was to swallow my own medicine. Having to give feedback to the team and also having to swallow the same pill is quite something.

Recruitment is hard. There’s so much more to hiring than interviewing someone for the role. Do you really need the extra hand? What are the operation expenses and how does it quantify with work delivered? How does a new recruitment fit in with the rest of the team? What happens when you make a bad recruitment? How do you make up for the time lost in the process? These are questions I had to ask myself. There’s still so much to learn here and if you have answers to some of these questions I would love to know your thought process on this.

Although I was having a great run at work, I lost time for my personal projects and school. I got caught up in a specific stack for most of the time. This was quite an unpleasant experience, a point of no growth and of which in my position I was supposed to be two steps ahead but I wasn’t.

🌟 Every cloud has a silver lining

I created a simple open source web application to show vaccination centers in the country using information provided by the ministry of health as a way to make it more accessible for the citizens. In the process, I made it to the twenty seventh position on the github commits for public repositories which is a much better position than I was last year. I started to learn Elm in the quest to learn Heskel at some point and although I didn’t put in the hours at least I can push harder with this next year.

Patience & Agony 😑

Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true! — Aesop’s Fables

What happens when there’s a scuffle between you and a team mate? What happens when you lose control of a situation but have to come out of it? What happens when you’re backed in a corner and nothing seems to work? What happens when life is in the way and you just can’t take it? What happens when you feel empty and alone?

I prayed for times like this where I could work like this but these are some of the questions I came across and definitely struggled with having the right answers. I had to live through some tough situations to come up with a hint of what the correct solution was.

The process is tough, for a moment there I had so many regrets, wishes, prayers and a bunch of sleepless nights. Is this what I really signed up for? Yes, definitely but no one said it would be easy and unfortunately when it got bad, it was really ugly which led me to a point of second guessing every single decision and prayer request that led to this point.

I was patient enough to live through it all which all led up to a point of excellence, for where there’s no adversity there cannot be growth. I learned for the better part to turn lemons into lemonade and tried to pass the glass on to everyone around me. We all needed it. I hold my head up high because of the team, everyone that held me up to this moment.

You have to be willing to keep it together till the very end.

Fun + Service 😜

I enjoyed a fair share of enjoyments this year. I went to “Vegas”, broke some rules and did some things I wasn’t supposed to do. I made a couple of awesome people who eventually became my friends.

We got DevFest this year which was awesome. It has been almost two years since I had been to a developer event and it was great seeing everyone once again. I hope we have more physical events now that normalcy seems to be creeping in and probably I can throw in a talk at one of them.

One of the goals this year was to travel although I didn’t have quite much of destinations with a partial lock down in place this was quite hard to pull off but I am glad I got a couple of through passes and made it happen. I went camping, strolled around the beach, I went on a forty eight hour journey through Tanzania. I learned a couple of words in a new language (Kirundi), I made a couple of awesome friends a long the way as well.

I traveled to Burundi for the Hacking Burundi Week which was organized by Adi-loits in partnership with BujaHub. I was also among the facilitators for Burundi Innovation Week which was organized by UNDP Burundi. It was a great experience interacting with over forty entrepreneurs but also quite challenging especially since we were discussing using different languages but overall I loved the experience and I can’t wait to go back next year.

Additionally, I was one of the trainers for a literacy project for a group of twelve girls which was organized by the Rotaract Club of Muyenga Breeze in partnership with APAAR foundation which ran for two months in Kanyogoga, Namuwongo. We covered the basics of computer and office applications and I hope we can build on to that with the next cohort and have some advanced principles as well. It has honestly been a pleasure and I am grateful to everyone who contributed in whatever way possible. #ServeToChangeLives

Failures 👎🏽

I am not what you think…

I made some bad calls over the past couple of months which have led to some catastrophic turn of events. I can’t help to think that maybe it was because of my ego, pride, poor communication or rather I just didn’t listen and failed to seize the opportunity.

These are all things I came toe to toe with and failed miserably. When there’s so much at stake, some failures are quite unreasonable and very costly. I’ve had to pay the price for some of these shortcomings although I have been fortunate enough to get off a couple of them with a warning but every dog has its day. I had quite many of those this year. Yes I failed in all that but I wouldn’t undo any of it.

I failed my health but luckily I got away with it. A lot of people aren’t here to say the same, I don’t take this for granted and honestly I would turn this around and do much better if I could but I am fortunate enough to still be here and do better.

I failed to keep it together with some friends and family. I lost some really good friends to work, school and the dreams in my head. I had to make a couple of sacrifices and unfortunately there were repercussions but I always hope that it pays off at some point and that it all makes sense in the end.

One would argue that this has been quite a terrible year with a lot of failures in finances, social life, health among other aspects of my life but at least I tried. 😪

Whatever you’re going through, I hope you find a happy place. The sun will rise and we shall try again. 🤗