Disclaimer: As of this article, I am not yet certified. I am only recounting my journey towards this goal. It is my hope to come back and write about my success in this perspective.
In almost mid-2019, Google together with Andela and the online learning platform Pluralsight launched Africa's Developers scholarship program's 4th Edition. This is part of Google's goal to swell up the number of developers in Africa, whether Android, Mobile Web or Cloud-based. Their main goal together with Andela is to create the right set of teams, equipped with the best skills and more effectively, growing a healthy community.
Within the periods of June moving forward, I had no idea that my journey within this program will be leading me to be amongst the top 1000 devs, especially when I had considered the mammoth population size of 30,000 devs selected at the beginning of the program all across Africa.
Just a little bit about my program of choice
If you are the self-taught type of dev like me, you must know what it feels like to be less confident about yourself and in your abilities. This is what we sometimes cleverly call the impostor syndrome.
Interestingly, failure can prepare you even better for greater achievements when you receive it with the right mindset. Not being able to go through this same program in 2018 when Google partnered with Udacity made me learn a million things along the way.
As a matter of fact, that was only the beginning. I firmly promised myself to go through the program if given another chance and fortunately 2019 brought it right to my doorsteps. Who on earth will let go on a second chance? I enrolled in the Mobile Web Specialist Track just as I did the last time. Here are some reasons why:
- I am very passionate about building websites and applications that run on the web.
- Familiarity with content can give you an upper hand. So I decided to explore more and grow my skills as a Javascript developer.
- Last year's program introduced me to a very new concept called Progressive Web Apps. I had never heard this before. This made me even more curious to get to the bottom of this, plus, I thought it was way cooler for me to build a site that worked like a mobile app. In that way, I would not have to kill myself of ever wanting to learn about app development at least.
- Android development is very resource-intensive especially when it comes to installing Android Studio and again, I didn't just want to hold on to Java(no hard feelings here). My hardware wouldn't be sufficient enough to sustain me as compared to Javascript where all I needed was just a simple text editor and a web browser.
There are obviously more reasons but I would say it was worth it. I hope to bring you into my world of trial and error, successes and failure, challenges and breakthroughs within the subsequent posts.
In the meantime, my goal is to prepare hard and succeed in this exam scheduled for March 2020. It will definitely be a dream come true.
Top comments (0)