Week 22-24: Family and Friends
Mercy and I decided to take some time to visit my extended family in Ilora while we were in Lagos. We made our travel down to Ibadan and then Ilora. My parents and sibling were happy to receive us even with the short notice to them before our journey there. I also had the chance of meeting my long-time friend, Basit, in Ibadan. I had the chance of meeting his mum, whom I haven't seen in over five years.
While we were there, my Mum brought Amala (Lafun) with Eforiro to our hotel room to welcome us. I can say I've missed Iya Egbe's (what we call my mum) home-cooked delicacies. More specifically, I haven't eaten Lafun in years.
After so much travel to and fro Lagos, I had the opportunity to meet my friends from school. Since the time they attended my wedding, we haven't had the opportunity to meet ourselves. So we decided to have two days to ourselves - camp in a place, talk, gist, eat, argue, and watch movies together just like the old times back in school. Personally, I was very happy to see them. and even happier that we're able to maintain communication with ourselves after almost 3 years after our degree. This is the second physical meeting where we've all camped together in a place. Prior to this point, we have maintained regular monthly calls on a Sunday night where we just get to gist and talk about progress as far as the things we're doing are concerned. We had maintained these monthly online group calls since 2020 and I would say it's part of the reason we had stayed in communication. I'm happy I share this with my current friends and I look forward to many more years with them.
I had this moment in the past where my friendship with others couldn't survive beyond the years we spent inside the school (High school) basically because we couldn't communicate often. I could say a friendship will only exist for as long as the concerned parties communicate regularly. My university friends, we had to all agree that if we don't have our monthly calls, we probably won't be friends in some years to come. We would basically fallout from a friendship where no communication exists.
I spent over 5 years in Abeokuta for my degree but didn't have the opportunity to visit Olumo Rock, maybe because, at that point, my focus is just on school and school-related things only. I barely had the chance of participating in most of the social events around school back then. While we were in Abeokuta, where we camped together as friends, we took out some time to visit Olumo rock. It was quite fun climbing our way up a 137-meter-high rock formation. I would acknowledge the fact that some parts of it were dangerous 😩, given that I'm not used to such heights. When we got to the peak, it feels so good seeing Abeokuta from up the rock. I can see many of the areas we would go around in cars.
We entered Surulere, a popular Amala joint in Abeokuta to eat Amala together at a round table.
Another moment we shared together while in Abeokuta was seeing the new Jurassic World: Dominion together at the Cinema. For me, it was nice seeing Chris Prat in action again since The Tomorrow War. The next time I will see him on the big screen will be in Thor: Love and Thunder.
At work, I've always wanted to adjust myself to work on areas where I have significant interest. I thought of this as a way to keep making an impact in the company while improving myself. I've started exploring how I can even better align myself for this. I've seen some areas of interest I would like to work in and I want to make the move and see how this would go. I had a conversation with my lead to mark the beginning of this process and am quite optimistic as it proceeds.
While making our way back to Uyo, myself, Mercy and Tobi almost missed our flight. Given the preceding facts that we all set out early into the journey to the airport, I didn't see this happening. But the circumstances changed when our ride back to Lagos had issues and had to wait for hours before we finally got it sorted. It happened again just when we were around 10 minutes away from the airport. We've never had to rush into the Lagos airport like this before, but I was at least satisfied that we made it into the plane.
Currently on PHPSandbox, scaling our storage has been a major concern in a number of ways. For a platform where people will store their codes, making sure there is storage available and also reliable can be challenging. Funds are limited and the more storage we use the more the money paid for it. At the same time, we want users to have their contents (files, etc) whenever they need them. It has always been a battle between saving money and keeping things reliable for our users. At this point, adding more storage when we need them doesn't seem to scale well for cost and we needed a new way to go around this. The majority of my task has been around finding solutions to this problem. I got an idea that can keep our storage to only what is used (actual usage not allocated usage) and will require some implementation proofs to see if this would address some of the challenges.
I had the chance of attending Google IO Extended Uyo - yet another opportunity to go out of the house and catch up with community friends while meeting new people. I was part of the volunteers for the event and helped with checking people who registered online into the event Hall. I couldn’t listen to most of the talks as my work as a volunteer was majorly outside. It was good seeing newer faces speak at major events in Uyo and would encourage others to do the same.