Nevertheless, Florence Coded Because Nothing Can Stop Her!

Journey

The funny thing about me being in tech today was the fact that I actually wanted it for a friend and ended up going into it myself 😂. It was literally a ‘um I don’t have anything doing right now, let me just try this. How hard can it be uh?’ moment.

I applied and got into a state coding program (CodeLagos) at the time in 2018 and my journey into tech started. Funny thing, first day of class, I got there very early and had to wait for my tutor and other classmates to arrive. I sat in a library around there and picked up a book to read to pass time, I became engrossed in the novel and when I checked the time, I was 20mins late for my class so I had to rush down to the class 🤦🏾‍♀️😂

Stay with me guys, still on the first day of my journey. They had an intro session which I missed and the tutor was already taking them on headings in HTML - you can imagine the confusion I was in Lmaoo. I was lost!!! I pleaded with someone beside me to put me through as the class was moving fast because the program was only 6 weeks for a web development course and we had a lot to cover.

Fast forward to week 3, I was getting the hang of it and decided to embed my tweets in an assignment - a basic fast food website (ps: we weren’t asked to embed 🌚, I just wanted to do something that fascinated me) so after a series of googling, it worked and it felt sooo good that I had to share with my tutor that very night, he was pleased and shared it with the rest of the class.

By the end of the program, I had already gained a lot, made new friends and even a life long mentor(my tutor). I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I enjoyed writing lines of code and seeing it become something so beautiful. After the program, I got an internship and started learning how to use WordPress to make websites and got on few projects during that.

I then took a year long break from Tech in 2019 to focus on other things while also battling imposter syndrome so I would like to think I started coding fully in 2020. I have gone on to be on multiple projects and even have projects of my own 🤩😊

My most recent achievement was…

So a week ago today, I wrote my first technical article - How To Make Wine Glasses With HTML & CSS and the turnout has been nothing but amazingggg!!!

I almost screamed a day after when I checked my dashboard and saw over 6k views, I had to share the news with my friends and asked them if it was normal to have that much view lool. The crazy thing was the views kept increasing day by day and today it has over 13.3k views in a week 🥳!!!

Biggest one - the Google developer student club(DSC) at Masinde Muliro Univeristy in Kakamega, Kenya replicated the wine glass at a web session. The moderator gave me a shout out me on twitter, it was so surreal that I almost cried!!

I am really grateful for the reactions, engagements and feedbacks from everyone. Big shout out to my Peths Digital family and my best friend for encouraging and supporting me, love you guysss ❤️!

Advocating for myself looks like…

• Self-affirmations
• Taking breaks
• Not selling myself short - I love letting people know what I do
• Knowing I have a lot to learn and taking it one step at a time

My biggest goal is…

To reach a point in my career where I can positively impact people's lives and use my platform to help women, children and the less privileged. I know how it is to be torn apart by men in the industry, I wouldn't want anyone to go through that and I am making it part of my mission to help women going into tech by providing support and letting them know that yes! They can make it as a woman in Tech.

My advice for allies to support underrepresented folks who code is...

• Give us the chance to do something great, we are also a working member of the society.
• Listen to us
• Lastly, you can't be sexist or openly support sexism by not calling out sexists and call yourself an ally!!

Sidebar

As a woman, you're powerful, you're beautiful, you're strong and you're amazing. Keep your head high, pace yourself, keep being yourself, and let the world feel your impact. You rock ❤️!!!



Illustration from undraw.co