I've been struggling with thinking about what I wanted to talk about here so I decided to talk about my entire Dev journey(at least up till the point of writing this post). If you like long reads then keep reading(if you don't like long reads, keep reading anyway. Reading is good for you😁)
Ok, so it started when I was young (I'm still young anyway, so maybe younger?), I was the designated family electrician or tech guy. Whenever the remote wasn't working or the radio wasn't doing what it was supposed to do my mother would ask me to fix it, which I always did.
I was very into computers and video games, mostly video games, I'd spend hours in front of the screen playing games and enjoying myself.
When it was time to pick a course for University, It was only natural that I would study Computer Science in College. That was the only thing that interested me.
So there I was, in school studying something I was passionate about. Now, I didn't know or care about programming at this time, I just knew I liked computer stuff. When I first got introduced to programming in my first year, I didn't care for it that much, maybe it was how my teachers handled the classes, or maybe it was just me not being interested, I don't really know. All I know is, I didn't learn programming to Know programming, I learned just to pass my exams and that was all. That's how I went throughout my entire stay in university. At the end of my 4-year course, even though I finished with good grades, I honestly didn't know what I wanted to do with my life because essentially, I didn't learn anything, I crammed stuff throughout.
Luckily(or unluckily but we'll get to that), my dad had a friend in a bank that offered me a contract position with what I thought was decent pay. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. I already didn't know what I wanted to do after college, so maybe this was a sign that the universe was giving me. 2 weeks after I finished my studies, I started working in the bank. No interview or Screening exercise of any kind because of who I knew.
Considering the fact that the unemployment rate was(still is) extremely high, getting a job without much fuss was a dream come true, but boy was I wrong.
I don't want to get to the details of the job, but basically, I was working without the prospect of promotions, or pay raises, or any career growth of any kind really.
I only realized this a year into working there and had to do something about it quickly. That was when I decided to go back to my old nemesis, programming. I mean, I already had a computer science degree and working knowledge of web design so I thought it couldn't be that hard.
So, I started learning to code while I was working a full time 9-5, and I can honestly say this was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, like in my whole life. I had to fight sleep on so many weekdays and sacrifice a lot of my weekends to meet up with my goal, but I told myself I wanted a new job after 6 months. I already, knew HTML and basic CSS so I skipped straight to JavaScript.
I took Jonas Schmedtmann's Udemy course, which remains, till this day, one of my best ever purchases, a Brilliant course. After that, I learned Node.js (since I was already comfortable in JavaScript) because I wanted to focus on backend development but I needed to whip up a website to show off my work. I ended up learning vue because I thought react was too mainstream. Anyway, I built my portfolio, registered on Github, started pushing code to my repositories, and joined Dev.to (lol) to document my journey and share my learnings.
6 months later, I felt I was ready to start applying to jobs. So I whipped up my resume with the best(free) online editor I could find and applied to my first position. I got rejected. This was my very first rejection so it got to me and I didn't apply to another position for another 2 weeks.
During those two weeks, I was reading about different people's journeys and a common thing most of them said was not to take rejection to heart. It was natural and didn't necessarily mean you weren't good enough. It's something that happens in life generally and not just tech so you shouldn't think too much about it. This gave me renewed hope and i started applying again. I was still getting rejections lmao but at least now it didn't bother me that much. Of course, I dont like rejection, nobody does, but I made sure not to tie that to my self-worth and self-esteem.
Ok, so I had been getting rejections left, right, and center(some didn't even reply) but I kept applying and learning all while I was working. Eventually, I got my first positive response. it was the Quora Software engineer (new grad, Canada) position. I was initially skeptical about applying to this because I obviously was not a new grad and I wasn't even authorized to work in Canada (lmao) but I applied anyway. I got sent an Online Assessment so the company could have an idea of my coding capabilities. At this point, I started panicking because I hadn't practiced Data Structures and Algorithms at all and I had a week to take the assessment before the link expired. Long story short, I chickened out and didn't take the test at all because I was scared I would fail and I can comfortably say right now that I have regretted that decision ever since.
After the fiasco of not taking the Quora exam, I decided to start learning Data Structures and Algorithms, so I would never be unprepared for an interview or coding assessment again.
A few weeks later, I had another positive response from a Job application. It was for 3-month Internship, organized by Microsoft and partner companies to upskill young African graduates in Cloud technologies and general Tech Workplace readiness. I Accepted the offer, quit my bank job, and officially started my Tech career.
It's been 3 weeks since I started my internship and I've already learned a lot, especially about Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform. I'm still learning, growing, and trying to improve myself. I also hope this internship leads to a full-time offer. Fingers crossed 😊
We're finally at the end of this post whew. If you read the whole thing, you're AWESOME! I hope you found the post inspiring or helpful. Feel free to reach out to me here or on LinkedIn to say hi (i don't bite)
P.S: Apologies if the spacing between paragraphs isn't good.
Top comments (3)
wow! I'm an undergraduate of computer science in my third year and I agree with you on the programming stuffa and how they teach them especially here in Nigeria. It wasn't until my 2nd year holidays that I decided to start out with web development that I knew I was wasting my time if I didn't learn something
So you are a SkillsLab Intern at Sidmach Technologies, right?
Yup yup