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Linus Muema
Linus Muema

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2 years of writing code

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For starters, I have joined all my high school shenanigans into one year. Let's be honest, not much was going on there. Some guys from Andela used to come and teach us basic HTML tags. At this point, I felt like I could now rule the world with my programming skills (some will say HTML is not a programming language). There was only one problem, my links, buttons, and forms were useless as I did not know where to store my data or what to do with it. Then Javascript came swinging in. This was something very new and the idea of having to learn data structures and control flows was not the best. I just wanted to dive deep into writing complex code. Later I came to learn (the hard way 😣 ) that it was not the best idea.

Skip all that and come to after school, I was lucky to get into the access program at Moringa school. This was where everything changed. I got to learn various languages and how to adapt and learn them. It's not always about getting to write code straight away. There were basics one needed to learn. I can't tell you how many assignments I had to repeat because I did not do them as expected. Again, it's where I had to choose whether to take up full-stack web development or move to Android/Java. Of course, I took Android. My reasons being:
Most people were choosing python as it was said to be easier than Java and so I decided to take up the challenge ✊
Android seemed cool. Just imagine creating applications. We are used to interacting with websites and there are so many ways to create one but Android was just something else. Let's say the cool kid's stuff 😎 .
Advice from a good friend. He told me Android had very many opportunities and that it has a good community πŸ’ͺ.

Those were enough to make me go to Java. It was quite awesome to create apps and run them on my android device (we all know emulators don't mix with 4GB RAM machines. smh). I can't forget my first app. I wanted to create a hybrid between Spotify and Musixmatch i.e streaming + lyrics. Too bad I had no idea how to use the Spotify SDK and the Musixmatch API only gave 30% of the lyrics. Copyright issuesΒ :(

I graduated from Moringa school and was convinced that I was ready for the market, but I could not get a job. I came to realize that I had a long way to go before I could get into the job world. There were many things I had to learn and get a few tricks up my sleeves. I had no other option but to go to campus and see what I could gain from there. I got to learn kotlin and drop java for my applications. I wrote some small app that consumes the Github API for basic activities and published to play store. Fast forward to now, I enjoy writing kotlin code and have recently taken up VueJs and NodeJS for server-side. Although, Node is being replaced with Kotlin Server-side in my list. My goal is to migrate to Kotlin fully: web applications with Kotlin.JS, server-side, and android applications. I will be posting various "how to's" and their codes as I share my journey as a developer.

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