2023: Year of Wins and Near misses

“Count your blessings and name them one by one”

Sometimes, counting our blessings is all we need to remind ourselves how far we have come, that everything is not all gloom, everything is not all bad and by all means, we are miles away from where we started, maybe not at the destination yet but we far ahead of the starting point, and ladies and gentlemen, that is progress.

2023 was a solid year for me, but it took me writing out this thread on Twitter sometime last week for me to come to terms with how great it was. Here is the thing, I started this year on a great note and with high expectations. Finally, I was doing my dream job as a machine learning engineer at a new but awesome startup building a very nice product. The best part of it? My role was core machine learning, machine learning engineering and ops, just enough dose of what I like and enjoy doing, life was good bruh!! I think the peak was me attending Lagos Tech Expo and seeing the excitement and awe on people’s faces using the product I’ve been building, it’s like that moment when a mother finally meets the baby she has been carrying for months, the joy is incomprehensible.

That same quarter, a paper I contributed to was accepted at ICLR, this was yunno a huge one for my budding research career also, a big shoutout to Chris Fourie, one of the nicest people I know at SisonkeBiotik and the entire team, hoping I can do more for the community this year. I bought myself a MacBook also. So here’s the backstory to that, as of last year December, if someone told me I was going to buy myself a Macbook I will say it was a lie, the only hope I had for winning a MacBook was via two giveaways (Enyata and Cardtonic, both who were doing giveaways at the time), interestingly, I got to the final stage for both but lost both, I was like, yunno what? I’m going to buy myself a Macbook and I did. Guess I was a bit liquid at the time (the next goal is “unbelievable liquid”, from my mouth to God’s ear).

I think the highlight was my interview for Meta’s AI residency program in March. This singular incident is the greatest motivation I have in my career that “if I’ve made it this far, then I can only go all the way”. I mean this was me, learning Stochastic Gradient Descent, GANs and Graph Neural Networks in the morning while cramming the shikimic pathway, Feline Diabetes and Pharmacodynamic parameters at night. Just 3 years ago, for more than 6 months, all I was able to learn was via Google Colab using my 1 gig RAM Itel phone that by the time you switch tabs, you have to wait 20 mins for the tab to load again. The most interesting part of it was that the interview was on Data Structures and Algorithms which I really didn’t have that much idea about prior and went on to kill the interview with just about 3 weeks of preparations. Sadly, Meta had to close the role just because of the macroeconomic challenges at the time (they had just laid off another set of people, I think). I went on to interview with some other top companies both locally and globally.

I finally finished from Unilag, after 7 long tiring and tumultuous year journey, I finally collected my B.Pharm. I couldn’t explain what I felt more, relief or joy, but anyway, I am glad that phase is finally over. There were some other wins in between that I struggle to remember now, I won one essay competition winning a couple hundred dollars, won PSN-YPG hackathon too, can’t remember others again sha. But if it was all rosy like this, then, why did I feel down, like an underachiever, like the year was a shitshow? Because life happened and it does not need to inform you beforehand nor take permission from you to, it just happens. I think the really first bitter pill for me to swallow was not finishing with distinction. This has been a long-time goal of mine and I fumbled it, well, I didn’t, life happened. I mean I started on a very great note in that school, I mean what better evidence does anyone need than when my friend, who graduated as the second-best graduating student in my class said I motivated her to give it a shot (Ennie, thank you very much for that kind word, it will always remain with me forever). It’s just quite ironic that, that me, “the motivator” didn’t end up with the distinction. I guess it tells more of the story of how we can motivate and inspire people to be the very best version of themselves, and go for some wins even if we don’t ever get to achieve it.

School was great actually until sometime between my third and fourth year in school when I had about 8 or 9 courses where I scored 69, yes 8/9 course, and yes 69. The sad part is nobody is going to look at the transcript and see that “Oh!! He actually had 69 in all of them, he missed out by just one mark”. if you have just one of those, you’ll be like “well, it’s part of life”, if you have 2 or 3, you’ll be like “okayyyyy”, at the end of my stay in Unilag, I think I had 69 in about 11 courses (i think a couple were 59s too), yes, that is jaw-dropping and it was really just sad, but yunno what they say, life ultimately goes on. I had crazy anxiety attacks also during the year, at some point, the sound of my phone ringing was all my mind needed to go bananas, it was sad and debilitating that it affected my ability to work, to concentrate, to focus and finish projects I was already on, I had to make a couple of refunds also on project I had already taken on. I lost money too, there was someone I did a project for that ran away with my money, this is in hundreds of thousands of naira sha (Tom, if you’re reading this, please send me my money, let sapa not win this war against my life).

In addition to all those, getting interviews in top global companies is def a good signal that you’re on the right path, but at some point, converting those roles will be the better thing and so when I missed out on roles upon roles, you’ll begin to wonder if there’s an agency at work, losing out on two roles in December, especially one where I got to the final stage for an internship in UK was very painful as I had already lost my job at this point. At sometime, you’ll start feeling like maybe it’s because you’re a fraud or just not good enough which I think is true. Not in the sense of self defeat but in recognition of the fact that I can be better and I should be, so yeah, maybe I am not good enough for where I am supposed to be.And yes, I lost my job around the ending of the year due to the recent economic donwturn for startups plus I was about resuming for my one year internship and was not sure how well I’ll be able to handle both, so yeah, sad! sad!! sad!!!

However, I’m not going to absolve myself of all the responsibilities here, I guess 2023 taught me more about myself than I already knew. First, my communication sucks. I think it’s easy to communicate when everything is working perfectly, but it is harder but much more important to communicate when things get rough and here is where I missed it. Around the time I was battling with anxiety, so many things were happening simultaneously, but I thought I needed to sort everything out first and figure it all out by myself before communicating, I think it’s something I learnt from childhood having to look out for myself, nobody really cares about the excuses, they just want the problem solved. While true, it’s also perfectly fine to communicate the uncertainty, the challenges you’re facing, that you’re clueluess about how you’ll solve it but you’ll still give it your best shot, how you’re trying to navigate the problem and most importantly, that you need help. It’s totally fine to just communicate and that is a lesson I’ll be taking with me for the rest of my life. I guess I have messed up some relationships and important networks, but like another of my favourite quote says “na who disappoint you go still make you proud”, if given enough time and grace, I hope I can rebuild these relationships going forward.

Also, I discovered I have a long lag/acceleration time after some moment of deceleration and break. I think I first discovered this while studying in school, it takes me about 30 mins or an hour to get to the same level of concentration and focus if I took a break in between, it takes me a long while to start my day if I wake up late, I really just can’t go from 0 to 100 in 10secs, it takes a while. But the reality is we can’t go full speed 365 days a year, there are times we actually need to rest and calm, restrategise before giving it another go. I guess this is something I haven’t figured out yet but willing to figure out as the time continue.

I think one final thing I learnt is the tradeoff that exist to life, I went from believing there are limited opportunites for me in the world to seeing the boundless opportunities that exist, but the question I ask myself now is, how much effort do I put into each of these opportunites? Don’t get me wrong, I give a shitload of effort trying to secure the bag and the opportunities but the question is, do I approach each one like it’s the only opportunity that exist for me in the world? Or do I put in just some decent effort and shrug it off with “well, that is just life” when I don’t win. Well, unlike some other things where you can either have this or that, not both, you (and I) can actually have both in this case, chase off every opportunity that you see for you and put in the best effort to each of them like it’s the only one you have. it doesn’t mean that you’ll get all of them, but you’ll know you gave your best and that counts for something.

I’m very optimistic about 2024 and the abundant opportunities it has for me. It already smells like ease and endless possibility but one thing I’ll be focusing on this year is developing the bias for action and leveraging the power of consistency. I think I can get caught up in that preparatory phase for so long that I’m almost exhausted before I start and I think it ties back to that second thing about my long lag/acceleration but my goal for this year is not to dey explain explain because I dey tire quickly, I want “doings” to want to choke me, like that reddit post, I want my brand to be that 10X engineer and with absolute no shade nor insult intended to content creators (I really mean it), I don’t think that for me, it is smiling behind the camera, saying “welcome back to my Youtube channel”, it’s by building stuff, moving fast and doing that consistently. That’s not to say I won’t be willing to share whatever it is I learn along the way, the baseline is expect less talking from me, you’ll probably see less of me everywhere too, I guess it just have to be that way till yunno. Lastly, I hope to live a truly happy and free life, enjoying the mundane things of the moment, no matter how fucked up or insane the moment seems, I think that is the only true way to live because the next big thing no dey ever finish. I just want to live.

In conclusion, I really struggled to get this review under way, but it has turned out to be this 2000 words rant, I guess I’ll just wrap it up here. So as we all can see, 2024 is already here and like I tell people, it’s Tabula rasa baby, because it’s really a new blank check and slate, it doesn’t matter how you tried and failed, made fun of yourself and underachieved last year, what matters now is what you do with the new start, new slate and new opportunity before you, alot can happen in 2024, if you’re willing to make it happen and as you continue in this new year, “I want you to be successful and to earn it, but realise that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself”. See you in 2024, and yes, please incase you guys have or you know anyone having an opening for a machine learning engineer or data scientist, please holla, I actually sabi and just lemme show, help a brother and not let hunger kill man this new year. A bientot.

Extra note: Y’all thought I’ll really forget? I found love or was it love that found me? sha, we found each other. Special shoutout to my girlfriend, she’s been a real bundle of joy and happiness to me and has kept me sane for the greater part of the year, iloveyou so much baby and God please, keep this one for me because one, I don’t have any energy left in me to be mingling with these single pringles and yunno nothing dey street, in Jesus name I’ve prayed. One last time. Adios.