2020 in Reviews — Grace

Segun Smute
4 min readJan 1, 2021
Random picture of me smiling

I’m just grateful for 2020. Felt like the worst year the world has ever seen but for me, it was one of my best. A lot happened this year and in this article, I’ll walk you through how it went down.

Career

A big part of what made this year very special. I started up 2020 not very sure what direction I was going.

HNGi7

I was getting ready to join the HNG internship, from the things I’d heard about the internship, i wondered how I would manage to do the program and other things. Then, COVID-19 came and locked everyone at home. This gave me the extra time I needed to face it head-on. I survived the Program, met and worked with many brilliant minds and came out voted as the best designer in the internship

Freelancing

During and after the internship I got a couple of gigs to add to my portfolio thanks to recommendations from my mentors. One in which i’m very proud of and can’t wait to see grow is Intercreativity — Linked Thoughts; a note-taking and notepad-sharing application running on Block-chain Technology that lets its users create text notes in the form of atomic elements and flexibly organize, link, and nest them.

It has powerful access-control configurations to share or make public portions of the content created by a user, and powerful searching features to explore other author’s content that is public or accessible to a given user.

Its key characteristic, compared to other recent similar application like RoamResearch, is that it lets users fork content from each other, and use this as a collaboration or discussion pattern that was not previously possible.

It also offers a fully decentralized Web3-based solution for storing the user content.

Screenshot of V0

My first Official job 🎉

After the internship, I got a couple of offers from various companies in different sectors, some with very funny offers but we move. I really wanted to bag something remote with a working environment that would help me grow. I applied for a few as well and got help from someone random(Now friend) on Twitter to make an excellently presentable resumé.

Fortunately, CEO of Kufuta (A Portuguese startup in Angola) reached out to hire me and bagging a 6-figure job. I have learnt a lot and met really awesome co-workers.

Friends?

I got re-acquainted with some old friends and our bond have grown stronger than it ever was, also met a lot of people this year. Some with which I can’t remember what life was before they came.

Photography

I took an interest in capturing beauty in the most random things. Although i didn’t follow it up that much. In 2021, I hope to take that to the next level

Random shots i took

22nd Birthday

Spent this one with my family and i got gifts for the first time in a long time😊
Was really happy about it and i was truly happy that day.

Celebrations and Owambe 💃

My cousin got married in 2020. And trust me, you have no idea how long I’ve waited for a wedding in my family. The way I danced, you’d have thought I was the groom. Was also a very good opportunity to bond with my family a bit more

Owambe shots

Conclusion

In all, I’m just grateful for the year. God is truly good. My expectations for the year was not up to 50% of what I eventually got. Learnt a lot of lessons to apply in the coming year.

2021 🤔

  • Be a better friend to the people that love me
  • Write more UX case studies
  • Increase my skill-set
  • Be happy
  • Find true love
  • Blog?? 🤔
  • Win!

Cheers to a wonderfully year. We move 2021!!

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Segun Smute

Product Designer scaling the User Experience of web 3