Twenty Nineteen.
My first year in Deutschland. Also, cheers to the new year.
It has been exactly one year since I left Lagos, Nigeria for Hamburg, Deutschland. I came here to work as an android engineer.
Reminiscing over the past twelve months, I’ll say that I’ve had quite the experience. I was nervous when I was leaving everyone and everything that I’ve spent the first twenty five years of my life with. I quickly realised that I was probably overthinking, and that everything will turn out fine, when the customs officer politely welcomed me to Hamburg.
I spent the first few weeks learning about our codebase and working on the easiest tasks and bugs. I was impressed by the modularity of the codebase and how it made working on newer features and fixing worrisome bugs to be less of a pain.
It was the first time that I worked in an agile squad that has an end to end responsibility; the squad delivered fully functional solutions on the parts of the app that we have control over. In retrospect, I think this has been a good system to work in. It made us to achieve our sprint goals most of the time.
I really enjoyed working with my squad because we had a nice team spirit. Everyone looked forward to the weekly barbecue. This eventually became an advantage when things became tough towards the end of the year. We were able to keep our motivation high and power through the storm.
Life outside work was nice also. I’d give a 4.5 star rating out of 5. Hamburg is a beautiful place to live in. I was able to converse with some locals using the English language because mein Deutsch ist schlecht. The public transportation system is awesome, I mostly commuted on the U-Bahn lines and they are reliable.
I had two apartments. One, an Airbnb, in January and the other from February up until now. Looking for a new apartment isn’t a pleasant experience. I looked through about ten apartments before settling for my current one. I feel uneasy because I have to do this again in a few months, my current apartment is furnished and therefore quite expensive.
I did a little bit of touristing in April. I decided to learn a few things about my city. I also took a trip to Düsseldorf to test out a feature in our app, and drink lots of beer.
I also tried my best to learn how to converse in Deutsch. It has been difficult, there are many moving parts: der die das. I think I have improved quite a bit, at the same time I still have a long way to go.
In the area of fitness and health, I didn’t achieve my fitness goal for the year. I’d enjoy the little win of being able to incorporate having frequent intensive workouts in my life. I also spent a lot of my savings on having a tooth replaced, the procedure wasn’t covered by my health insurance.
I’m looking forward to having more pleasant experiences in the new year. Ich wünsche euch allen einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr 2020. ✌️.
