Exactly one year ago today, I met Hillary Clinton! Yes, it was her, the very one, and I still remember the exhilaration I felt on that day and for days to come. It was a complete coincidence. I was having a networking lunch with Natalia, whom I met at a financial women's event, and she had invited two of her BNP Paribas coworkers. It was a fancy greek restaurant in midtown, NYC, one that I could probably not afford if it wasn't for its prix fixe lunch menu. While exchanging pleasantries with the waiter who happened to be from an eastern European country close to Albania, where I am originally from, he proceeded to tell us that Hillary Clinton would be seating in the empty table next to ours. Needless to say we were all freaking out! Long story short, I ended up taking a picture with her, right next to the bathroom, which I could have cropped, but this makes for a better story, for another day.

I was on cloud nine! It was a true Christmas miracle, and I couldn't help but think that great things were about to happen in 2020! I had just qualified to run the 2020 New York City Marathon and I was ready to take on the world! If someone had told me then, that 2020 would be the year of a global pandemic, when both my husband and I would lose our jobs, and we would have to school our kids remotely, I would have said "no way!", "this is 2020!" Saying it then, exulted a feeling of hope and vision!

From it all, what hit me the hardest was losing my job. I had never experienced it before and no one really prepares you for how to deal with the feeling of loss, rejection, and the hard-cold truth, "it can happen to anyone and that's OK". In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. Somehow, I missed all the signs, or was too proud to accept them. After all, I dedicated 12 years of my life and although it was a business decision, it felt more like an unexpected divorce. That, topped with a global pandemic, made the prospects seem pretty dire, but deep down I knew that the possibilities were endless. I was determined to find my place in the world.

With time, I learned to overcome the anger, sadness, and hurt, after all I am a positive and optimistic person. But I would not do it alone. On no! First and foremost, I had a strong family who would be there no matter what, a truly supportive husband who kept encouraging me every step of the way, and two lovely children who kept me busy and active. I started getting involved with the Financial Women's Association, which gave me a place to be creative, find a support group of women and men, and give back. I partnered with my amazing FWA membership chair Marie-Helene who became my close friend and confidante and through our "power" weekly sessions, kept each other honest, active, and goal-oriented. I established strong relationships, joined various networking groups, amongst them the Community of Seven, where I met my amazing guru and "guiding angel" Adrienne A. Wallace.  I reached out to all my mentors and biggest advocates whom I've always stayed in touch with and who have supported me throughout my career.  I created vision boards, evaluated my skills, expanded my knowledge, spoke with coaches, explored entrepreneurship ideas, got certifications, completed online courses, rewrote my resume a "thousand" times, read lots of books, connected with the authors, started incorporating new principles, exercised, and... put on makeup! Within a period of 9 months, I had spoken and zoomed with hundreds of people, more than I had ever done in my whole life! And for every day I wasn't motivated to get out of bed, there were many more where I felt optimistic and ready to face the challenges ahead.

Looking back, it was all worth it, the headache, the heartache, (maybe not the stress!) The journey has led me to an amazing opportunity, working on technically challenging projects with inspiring people. While I am completely happy, I cannot fully grasp the new reality. It feels like I have just woken up from a bad dream and I'm not fully awake! I also cannot help thinking of everyone else who is still struggling. While I celebrate the end of a very challenging year, I prepare for what's next in 2021.

Love and peace!

Albana

For the last few months I have been pursuing one of my passions -- Product Development. My husband and I have teamed up and we are excited to take steps towards building our first software product together. While the roadmap to the MVP will take some time, we are taking a different kind of incremental approach to the discovery part of the roadmap by aiming to build several nano-products on the way to prove key critical tech decisions and product concepts. Besides, this is more fun than being off the grid for months with little to share. These nano-products are not related to the MVP we’re pursuing.

The first decision was choosing the right technology to enable a small team to build cross-platform apps in a reliable and modern way. We needed to find a problem to solve and it was right in front of us. Our oldest struggled a bit with first grade math. Like many kids his age attending school remotely, he has a lot of trouble staying focused. We converted his arithmetic problems to an interactive game that we built with two different technologies: React Native and Flutter.

The technology decision became clear with Flutter as the winner in terms of a well designed framework, a modern language (Dart), and opinionated tooling that let us build something surprisingly quick that just worked. React Native, on the other hand, looked very promising at first but quickly set us on an overwhelming journey of competing options and difficult to reverse decisions.

But the most fun part for me was the product. We were striving to follow some of the principles that we set for the MVP down the road:

• Keep it simple ...
• Focus on results not engagement level: the ultimate goal for this nano-product is to deliver great results in the shortest amount of time, not the other way around.
• Your data is not ours to take: if collecting data is not essential to capability, stop collecting it. That means server-side pings or Google Analytics. If a user wants to report an issue they can choose to share the data and screenshots but nothing is collected automatically and without clear and explicit permission at any other time.
• Reduce apps fatigue by avoiding patterns that create it: 1) sign-up/sign-in when not really needed 2) multi-user for typically single-user device 3) Too many onboarding cards/options 4) Unnecessary gamification elements that promote retention but create anxiety such as fast animations, accenting green/red colors to signify success failure, checks/crosses, sharp/buzz sounds, etc 5) Language automation that does not guide with clues and continuous encouragement.
• Reinforced learning via repetition using both visual and verbal cues in a form that encourages conversation in a positive way.

The product took several days to design and the weekend to code. The results with the alpha built for an iPad were surprisingly delightful. Our son really enjoys the pace and the level of gamification of this learning without feeling anxiety or hesitation about making the next choice. His skills seem to have improved quickly.

Excited for the next adventure!

#remotelearning, #edtech, #gamification, #earlylearning, #techsolutions