My Biggest Lesson Of 2024

Chinonso Amalaha — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 08:20:25 +0000

Life promises nothing and nothing is guaranteed.

My 2023 Christmas season did not come with much celebration. I engrossed myself with preparations for the year ahead. I spent more time alone, recharging my inner strength, building on my passion for machine learning and completing online courses. I had a clear plan for the coming year, especially regarding my academic pursuits.

Determined to make 2024 a turning point in my career, I sought many global opportunities. But as the year unfolded, I was met with a mix of experiences that taught me valuable lessons. And, one lesson that stood out like a midnight star is that life has no formula and nothing is guaranteed. Despite my best efforts in the year, I encountered setbacks and challenges that forced me to reevaluate my assumptions.

I learned in the year that hard work, honesty, intelligence, and the like are essential in making life count. But they still do not guarantee success. You may still do more and get less. You may even wake up to a surprising blessing one of the days you least expected it. There is just no formula for these things.

Beyond efforts, prayers, and creed, the only thing we can understand about life, is that we can’t understand life.

When people attribute their success to God, they know their weaknesses wouldn’t have given them a chance. That is why I found it funny when some people attribute their success only to efforts and ability. When the same persons see themselves on the better side of things, they tend to believe others are fooling around or less ambitious.

The truth is that some people out there are dedicated, super talented and willing. Yet life says no to them. Some graduated at 21 but struggled for six years to get a job. Some had no education but still became millionaires. Some married at 20 but divorced three years later. While some found love at 35 and still got it right.

Careful planning and decision-making are good but they still do not guarantee success. Being too careful in choosing a life partner still does not guarantee a happy marriage. Being too careful with your health still does not guarantee longevity. One deadly impact on the body still ends it all.

With the torrents of uncertainties and mixed experiences, 2024 taught me patience, built my strength of mind and made me realize that things don’t always go our way.

Life takes unexpected turns. There is just no formula to it and nothing is promised in it. It happens in different ways and we must learn to accept and adapt to its unpredictability. That is my biggest lesson of the year.

Grace, luck and chance can happen to anybody.

In conclusion, as you anticipate 2025 to be a good year, it might still not be as good as you thought. You will not win every battle in the coming year but you can decide to show up for every one of them. You can decide to be more responsible with your choices, resilient in your pursuit, do your best and leave the rest to God. He alone is the lifter of men.

We go again in 2025!

HNGi8: My Coding Goals and the Beginner's Journey

Chinonso Amalaha — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 15:11:59 +0000

I want to be a self taught developer by the end of 2021. I want to be job ready...

While others were writing down their goals at the beginning of the year, those were the exact words I remember putting down as my goal for the year.

The passion supersedes any cost of time and energy and resources it'd involve, I just want to code, not for fun but to a professional level this time.

It's either I go big or I go home, that's the mindset with which I started the year.

Well, this is August now, so I'm still on the process. But it won't be out of place if anyone ask how far I've gone with my decision.

Anyways, I'm just a trekking distance away from 'Hello, World!', so you'll catch me struggling in the stringent hands of JavaScript now.

I still can't call myself a developer yet, despite the voluminous resources I've consumed online and torrents of self-paced tutorials I've been through all the while. Honestly, the journey is far from easy. And you know if it's meant to be easy, everybody would've done it, so don't blame me yet!

Learning to code is not just devastating but quite overwhelming. Each passing moment comes with torrents of tools and new trends that keeps spewing into the ecosystem. Even the numerous learning platforms and paths with diverse curriculum can make a total beginner like me waddle more into confusion.

One minutes it's fun, yeepeee! You just passed the first challenge and you think it's that easy.

Moving forward to the next one, you read through the task, you couldn't even understand anything not to talk of thinking out a clear solution.

You run to google for help, scribble the challenge into the search engine. And boom! a thousand and one solutions, sprinkled with strange syntax jumped right into your face.

You don't even know where to start. Next you get stucked and feel like throwing things on the wall. It's as if you've been wasting your time on Youtube videos all the while.

That's how overwhelming it can be. Most times, I stopped and get my mind off it or better still get into something else. But i never back down. And it's best to let anyone know that struggling is part of a beginners journey in coding.

I still don't know the most difficult thing to learn in life but I believe If you can successfully teach yourself a programming skill, then you can teach yourself anything else.

Earlier in my journey I decided against bootcamps, I just wanted to do it on my own. I believe being a self-taught would be the best and fastest way to fit into the system. But i was wrong, at least it didn't totally work for me, especially as I started with almost a zero knowledge of programming basics from college.

With a couple of Youtube video like this one here, learning HTML and CSS in freeCodeCamp wasn't too challenging. It's fun displaying those contents on a webpage for the first time, playing round the camper cat image and breezing through the challenges.

Getting to JavaScript algorithm and data structures I was so stucked that I wished I never started in the first place. But Baeu Collins video here prepared in line with the curriculum was a big help in scalling through the basics challenges in FCC. But I still have that not-good-enough feeling even after the projects and the certification.

Last week I decided to sort for bootcamps and coding meetups to spice up the journey. I needed that professional exposure. I think that's where bootcamps play huge roles by helping one meet other coding enthusiasts and collaborate on bigger and real life challenges.

So I found HNG Internship

It's a free online beginner bootcamp for complete tech novices handled by veteran tech experts with track records in the tech industry. It's aimed at providing mentorship and collaborative environment to the participants to help them overcome the hurdles and challenges at the entry level into the industry.

While gearing up for the internship this eight month of the year, I'm making this post to serve as my accountability partner in keeping track of my coding goals for this next 8 weeks of the bootcamp in line with my 2021 goal.

These are what I want to achieve at the end of the internship as I choose the frontend stack:

Learning frontend tools to a professional level.
Working on real life challenges to improve on the skill.
Building more projects I can add to my portfolio.
Networking with other coding enthusiasts.
And being job ready.

I hope to get the best out of this opportunity as I reminiscence in the words of Amelia Earhart when she said,

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

Thanks for reading. You can learn more about HNGi8 Internship

You can follow the tutorial links below to catch up on some technologies used in the internship.

Git, Figma, HTML
JavaScript, Python

DEV Community: Chinonso Amalaha

My Biggest Lesson Of 2024

HNGi8: My Coding Goals and the Beginner's Journey