DEV Community: Ngacho

Patience Persistence Results

Ngacho — Fri, 08 May 2020 22:40:59 +0000

This quarantine has provided me with more time to think about the direction of my career—negatively and positively in equal measure. I am still unsure of the exact details, but what I have spent most time thinking about is being professional. Yes, before, I could piece up functions to make my android apps do what I wanted, but I kept running into some common hurdles. For example, I have spent more time than I care to remember thinking about what to do when my apps are switched from portrait to landscape. I have also really thought about the structure of my classes, with all the messy code in a single place.

I of course turned to GitHub to look at sample examples of professionally written android apps, and I was not really shocked to realize I did not understand the code base of a single repository. I hardly understood how all the pieces connected together, and this immediately cast doubt on whether I could start contributing to open source.

To get a clearer direction, I reached out to people I looked up to. And the general consensus was that I should learn three things: app architectures—mainly MVVM architecture, the Databinding library, and Dependency Injection. As a beginner, I had always thought these to be intimidating topics to learn. They have a learning curve. The learning resources are limited, and it is worse if you are trying to learn them in a recent programming language—Kotlin in my case. I felt defeated even before I began. As every google search on ‘introduction to [x] in Kotlin’ (where x is either MVVM, Databinding, or Dependency Injection) brought zero to none results, my heart sank, slowly convincing me I’d never be a real Android developer. As I usually do when faced with a hurdle, I took a break from everything. In my short sabbatical, I remembered how I got here in the first place. I got this far by diving head first into a concept, and trusting that I’d grasp it somehow along the way.

When I got back, I decided to start with architectures—MVVM in particular. I got a few tutorials written in Java, and chose to follow the implementation rather than the exact examples. It took me a while, but when I did my first example in MVVM, I was quite pleased with the result. It was far from perfect, but it was honest work, a step in the right direction. I found out MVVM heavily relied on things called Live data, which as literal as it sounds, it wraps data that is live, data that is updated at runtime. I decided to do it a second time, this time, not relying on online resources, but to try and make my own from scratch. Of course, making it a bit more complex along the way. This time, the results were better: and my understanding of the concept was reinforced, my confidence restored.

With MVVM in the bucket, I moved to the next: Data binding. The second monster remember? The techniques I used in learning MVVM were useful this time. I scraped the web for tutorial blogs on data binding, and dove headfirst into it. It was far easier this time, albeit the debugging was demoralizing since databinding uses a lot of annotation processing. It took me about three hours of implementation and debugging, and at about 2 in the morning, I heaved that sigh of relief of everything coming together properly. I couldn’t stop rerunning my code just because everything seemed so clean. I was confident I am on the right path, the people I looked up to approved my code, confirming I was on the right path.
I don’t know if I am a professional developer yet, but I do know something: patience, persistence, and throwing yourself into the murky waters certainly has its own benefits. If you are uncertain about a concept, try taking a step back, and when you resume, let go of the fear of the concept, and just get started. Hopefully, I will remember these lessons and carry them on even as I learn Dependency Injection, and beyond.

Navigating thy desert of despair

Ngacho — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 02:24:33 +0000

In the culmination of all the frustrations that had been building up in me, I threw my hands in the air, and flipped my laptop. The resounding bang that followed was akin to what I had been feeling for many days now, almost weeks. “No looking at code this entire weekend,” I resolved, and something within me settled. As a glimmer of hope started shining within me, I thought if there is any light at the end of the tunnel, I should start looking for it. I had never experienced this in all my months as an Android developer. Everything was overwhelming, activities or fragments, things I knew, and things I didn’t know but needed to know… you name it. At some point, I thought Android wasn’t for me.

As most passionate developers do, I hardly avoided code all weekend. In fact, I started looking for options. I had read about MOOC.fi and 'The Odin Project', and after a lot of deliberation, I decided on 'The Odin Project', mainly because MOOC.fi taught Java, and it is Java for Android that had me pent up all these frustrations.

The web was exciting, it was enormous, maybe more enormous than Android, but it looked exciting. I started learning things: the difference between the web and the internet and the important skills to have as a web developer. I started looking at command line, and programming seemed all beautiful and good once more. It took me one article to figure out that what I had been feeling before was just a part of a programmer’s journey.

In essence, I was mainly frustrated because I was sure my Android programming journey would end somewhere, I was just never sure where nor how I’d get there. I was just drawn with the “Mirages of Mania”–dozens of tempting resources that appeared to have all the solutions I was looking for, but didn’t. I sought The Odin Project thinking it was the salvation I needed: that it would make me a real developer, while Android would not.

Thanks to that article, I self-diagnosed and started looking for solutions. I needed a strong goal; I needed a strong path; I needed to focus and avoid distractions. You bet this is what I did. I set myself strong goals to improve my Android development skills. I started learning Kotlin, which I had been postponing for months now even though it is crystal clear is the future of Android development. I decided to level up my Java skills through Michael T. Goodrich and Robert Tamassia’s Data Structures and Algorithms. I must say the frustrations are now long gone, they have been replaced by the desire to chart forward. I don’t know if my path will work or not, but the person who suggested I was in the Desert of Despair also recommended focusing and avoiding distractions. Who am I to dispute?

It has been going not so well, but in the desert of despair, we simply persevere.

What—and how—staying alone and being forced to cook reminded me about my programming journey.

Ngacho — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 06:37:26 +0000

The first time I opened android studio was two hundred and twenty five days ago. I was not only trying to recover from major setbacks in my life, but also felt abandoned by everyone I thought I was close to. I felt alone. Having non-existent hobbies (passions) then, it was only natural that my will to live on depended on any straws I could find and clutch on.

Little did I know that programming was lay among those straws: a friend of mine had over-estimated my coding capabilities and given me an android project to work on. She has since abandoned the idea altogether, but I am really glad she asked me to create the application. It’s what I’ve clutched on ever since. At least, I wake up every day looking forward to something. It may not be that great or revolutionary, but I’m glad I started this journey.

Similarly, I find myself alone today—in a remote village of my country. Nothing is wrong this time, I am just taking time off. I’m fully living alone for the first time in my life. I didn’t know it’s hard to decide what to eat if you live alone. It’s worse when you don’t have fast-food options nor know how to cook. Nonetheless, one has to eat. So after two days of surviving on bread and lots of coffee, I was forced to enter the kitchen and prepare something.

I remember looking at the utensils in the kitchen and thinking to myself, this exactly feels like what android studio felt the first time I opened it. It was new and strange. It felt like one big static main void. The two hundred and twenty five days I have been looking at android studio however came in handy. They inspired me. If I had hacked android studio, the tormentor of RAMs and senior developers, who was I not to hack a kitchen?

I recalled everything I had ever seen anyone do in a kitchen, gathered my ingredients, and psyched myself for this new challenge. “The worst thing I can do is make edible food, not bad, just edible,” I remember telling myself. I then set out to work, and after a lot of improvisation, I had something to eat. In my first attempt at cooking, I did well. As a matter of fact, I cooked something I thought was really hard—Ugali. As I enjoyed the first meal I have ever cooked in my life, I couldn’t help but draw similarities and extrapolate lessons from both my beginner journeys—in the kitchen, and in android studio.

When you are starting out, it doesn’t matter how you do it. What really matters is you do it. I remember one of my biggest weaknesses is thinking I could write industry (read FAANG) standard code. Looking back, I think I was a bit too harsh on myself, and ever since I accepted I was a beginner and I needed results not standards, I think my drive to code rose exponentially. I might have written lots of spaghetti code, but who cares? I know how to code, don’t I? For cooking, at least I didn’t fall into that trap. I didn’t hold myself to any particular standards. The fact was, I had never cooked, so imagining I could produce chef-like meals was not a goal in mind. I became comfortable with cooking something that is edible, not professional. With that, I know I will continue cooking, looking forward to become better at preparing meals. Point is, when you are starting out, do not care whether your code is industry-standard. Just ensure your code does the intended task.

Those are my only two cents. If you are deliberating either cooking or coding, don’t deliberate… just do it. I must warn you though, you might not be able to stop. Happy coding, and cooking!'