Is this a wrap-up?
2019 was an exciting year for me, from wrapping up Andela's 4 years Leadership Program to getting a Job in Berlin, Germany and leaving Nigeria. It wasn't easy to get a VISA appointment at the German Embassy in Nigeria. You would have to wait for about a year to secure one, so I had to take a shorter route by applying for a VISA via the German Embassy in Ghana. This was faster for me, a couple technicalities here as I had to do some reading to understand how the system there works. I don't think one would need to go through that route now, but it was fun for me to explore Accra, Ghana, and see their culture. Did I get the VISA from Ghana? Yes, and I also had to get a Resident permit. Still, In general, for you to apply from Ghana, you need to be a resident of Ghana with ties to the country, and yes, I did all these legally with the papers and documents to prove it, but that is a story for another blog.
I left Nigeria on the 1st of November of 2019 and resumed work on the 4th of November, which happened to be my birthday; I was given a warm welcome, gifts, and a good workspace tour. The Folks at Fraugster were amicable and polite, and to say these folks were brilliant will be an understatement of their technical skills. Fortunately, the language barrier wasn't there as the staff members were primarily international and English speaking. I was part of their Platform team, think of it as the backbone of the system, the servers, monitoring, logging, up-time and scaling; this was our forte. Some folks would also call this DevOps Engineering, but it was not limited to that definition. One of the services I built while I was there was a (Rate-Limiter) in Golang; to prevent DDOS, some research had to go into this task to understand the requirement before execution.
Did Corona happen?
It's the year 2020, and I am beginning to get the hang of the city. Corona happens, and Berlin goes into lockdown in the first quarter of 2020. This made us work from home for most of it. Working from home was great but lack of human contact can also make you feel lonely, mainly if you are used to human interaction. So I got a bicycle in the latter part of spring to explore the city, which opened my eyes to the beautiful city of Berlin. I also met exciting folks here and there while at it, and 2020 was also the year I got to meet my wife, but that's a story for another blog.
It's 2021. What's new, Samuel?
Berlin city was under partial lockdown with 2G and 3G rules where you are either vaccinated or not and with a corona negative test result. I met my wife in person for the first time, got married, changed jobs twice, met my wife's Parents amidst the corona situation, and made more friends. I would say God has been good to me. I can't complain.
It's now 2022, and I am thankful to God for the lessons I have learnt, for the people I got to meet and for unlearning and relearning a lot of things, how to interact with people and how to reason about life. One step at a time, they say, fingers crossed and let's see where God will take us to next as we navigate this thing called life.