My story
I've been coding for about 5 years now. I was not consistent in the early stages though, so, I can say that my most active years in writing codes have been the past two years. I got into the programming landscape back in 2017 when I was taking jamb lessons. I took a diploma in web design at Larry academy in Egbeda. At the time, although my initial interest was to learn python programming language which they didn't have but promised to offer if I completed the web design course. I never finished the course till date because I had to turn it down to prepare for school. I never got admitted that year so I had another one year to my utilization which at the time I wasn't happy about. I couldn't return to Larry academy because I told them I was certain of my admission to the higher institution and returning wasn't an option for me. I already had an understanding of HTML and CSS with a little introduction to Javascript which I had to learn on my own. I began to learn things on my own because I already had enough to push forward from my experience at Larrys'.
I wasn't satisfied with how limiting my knowledge was. I was a web designer but couldn't push any of the websites I created beyond my machine to the internet. I began to search the internet for how to serve my sites for free when i came across 000webhost which I used to see some of the websites I created live under 000webhost domain. I wanted more. These sites couldn't process user data or interact with a database. So, I opted for PHP as my new language to deal with the problem I was facing. Believe me when I saw setting it up was a challenge for me at the time. I used a XAMP server. It was quite confusing for me because it was a whole new territory. I didn't pick up PHP that much. You mean I now have to rename all my HTML files to have their extensions end with .php ...lol. I did, but looking for my PHP code in my HTML files was a nightmare. PHP is now better with it's own dedicated package manager composer and frameworks like Laravel and I think you can now isolate the PHP code from the HTML templates. I also learnt Java but never really used it much because getting things done in it required code that seemed verbose to me. I know a lot of Software engineers used it and it shines when you're developing a large application but for me I never had a CS degree and wasn't developing anything big or complex just yet. Absorbing the OO(Object Oriented) concept and language syntax and compiling codes before running them wasn't an easy one. I was used to writing procedural and functional programs.
I now understand OO. Things became all clear when I adopted Python programming language. I fell in love with the language from the first time i wrote an hello world program in it's. Although i found out it's much slower than Java because it's an interpreted language, I still like it because I owe most of my understanding of programming concepts to the language. semicolons, data type declarations and lot of rules from java was out of my way. I became comfortable with python and still use it till date. Played with packages Turtle, Tkinter, Kivy, Openpyxl(for spreadsheet manipulation), Django, Flask, beautiful soup, scapy and lot more. I started to gravitate towards the web development side of the language( Python is a general purpose program) due to my prior experience in web design. I learnt the basics of Django in three weeks as I was also working at the side and got better with time. I felt fulfilled and I had also gained admission. it was 2019 at the time. I've been doing all of my web developments in Django ever since. I've also checked out Node with express but I rarely used it because my Javascript isn't as solid as i'd love it to be. What Evan You did with javascript while he was at google and with Vue always reaffirm the fact that i wasn't good enough and that there was much to learn.
Welcome to the most recent times. I've now decided to push things a little further to start earning with the little I know and keep learning. I have imposter syndrome working with clients. Hosting a django site seemed to cost more compared to PHP from my view. you might even need a 3rd party service like Mailgun for emails and the pricing weren't affordable and a lot more. I've also tried out freelancing on Upwork and Turing. I've been having a hard time securing a job on Upwork because of the skill requirements. there are cases of Django+vue, Django+react and more as the web is transitioning to Web 3.0. I passed my python test on Turing but failed my django test due to my limited knowledge on caching in django but I can redo the test in 3 months time.
How does Internships help
Although I been able to achieve quite a handful being some sort of self taught developer(Thanks to google, stackoverflow, realpython, youtube and more), I've not been able to use the skills I've gathered over the years in real world problems, collaborate with a team of developers, secure a job as a developer, deal with imposter syndrome and learn some developer ethics. I figured out recently that I might be able to put all this to an end by applying for an internship. I'm currently interning at Zuri. At Zuri I have the opportunity to gain enough knowledge to help scale me through the tech industry for free. For free!!! That's pleasant to me because all I need now is dedication.
You can find out more about Zuri via these links
The road ahead
In 8 weeks for this new internship I enrolled in, I plan to
- Get better at Django (most importantly caching so I can redo my test on turing)
- Improve on my knowledge of backend dev (particularly get an idea of where GO lang fits in backend devlopment)
- Learn frontend (Just an idea of building APIs in the web 3.0 space feels limiting and web apps like google docs fascinates me. so perhaps setting me on track is sufficient)
- Learn how to collaborate with teams of developers.
- Meet with developers I can work with.
Even though I've come this far, I'm still not there yet and there's a lot to be done. I know it can be quite overwhelming for a beginners out there but today I give to you the same quotes I was motivated by and it still motivates me to push even further to being a better me and a better developer. “The expert at anything was once a beginner.” – Helen Hayes.
I have to stop now but I'm not leaving you without something to try. Being a developer is more than just writing codes. it's an art. As your maestro, I say, a glimpse of what is in the artist's mind is like a sketch on whiteboard with FigJam. Painting is code. paying attention to details is optimizing code. fixing imperfections is debugging. setting up your canvas is setting up your development environment for a masterpiece. And always “The art should always be elevated off the floor,” It is a known rule in the art world to never store your artwork on the ground. Always push your code to a remote repository like Github and Gitlab.
Dare to try!!!
Figma (developing and artist's mind)
Git (getting your art off the floor)
Python (the artist paint brush)
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