Wanderlust: A Developer's Journey - Part 1

Ogechi Ike — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 03:45:04 +0000

Photo is by Kira auf der Heide. Check out their work

What got me started on this journey?

I was in a rut. I guess I was in a headspace that could best be described as 'sad, frustrated, and desperately looking for something better'.

I've been struggling to get into tech for years. I got a job as a front-end developer/web designer at a small agency, but it wasn't meant to be. I got a certification in 2019, but it was to no avail.

I kept thinking that I've done something wrong when compared to my peers constantly pouring over all of my steps since I arrived at university in 2012.

Recently, I took a part-time job in the fulfillment center at a large retail company.

After a few months, I finally got the resolve that I've been missing for awhile.

Where am I right now in my journey?

Right now I'm working on building Whanderluhst, a glassdoor type fullstack web application.

I want to add onto a web app that I worked on with a small team which was an evolution of my senior thesis.

Where do I want to go?

My end goal is to become a UI/UX or Front End Engineer.

How will I get there?

The hard way. I want to be able to feel like I've earned the job. This might stem from my anxiety and imposter syndrome (I'm working on that as well).

What steps have I taken so far in this post?

Well, I've decided to start this journey and I'm sharing my progress with all of you.

I'm working on some of the designs which I'll be sharing in the next post.

What are my next steps?

The next steps of my journey is to work on what I want to feature and design the UX and UI for the app.

How do I feel about it?

I'm super nervous about on this and even more about sharing my progress, but the regret of not doing something outweighs my anxiety.

Hopefully, this will be a fun adventure!

Thanks for reading!!

For Me, Coding Is Kinda Like Baking

Ogechi Ike — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 12:59:33 +0000

I can’t tell you the first recipe I tried, though it was probably spiced drop raisin cookies (I will defend them as being good). My mother guided through the recipe with a patient hand while listening to gospel music using a mixer that has survived at least six presidents (I will make sure to get that mixer in her will).

For awhile, I thought all would wanted to do was bake until I got into code.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am by no means an expert (to be honest that is exceedingly rare to be in this field), but I’ve noticed that there are some similarities in how one could a approach a code prompt to a baking recipe.

Take Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars for instance (probably one of the easiest recipes for me to do). One thing is that the ingredients could be equal to the variables that you would have to set at the start of the recipe/program. Then you could have an overall function called makeCookies() with smaller ‘instructions’ inside of the function. One of the functions could be mixing the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla extract together with a while loop for assembling your dry ingredients. Another function could be a setTimeout for oven time with a for loop to check on the cookie bars (usually around 18 out of 22mins if using a 18” x 12” x 3/4” baking pan) with probably another while loop for clean up.

I figured that when one first gets into code, it would do one some good to compare it to something else and for me it’s baking.

DEV Community: Ogechi Ike