My story
The Start
My journey started in the year 2017 after completing my first year in the school of engineering. I was pursuing Electrical and Electronics Engineering. What motivated me into coding were my first languages (C++ and C) that I had learned as compulsory units.
Luckily my Dad had bought me a laptop during my second semester was coming to an end. During the long holiday after finishing my first academic year I decided not to go home and focus on building my skills in Tech. I remember going to use the school wi-fi at night to download Youtube videos because at that time only a few people were using it. I majorly used youtube videos and w3 schools in learning HTML and CSS.
It felt great building a website from scratch and being able to look at it and say I made this. It felt awesome and kept me going. I changed my code editor from notepad++ to bracket because it had better features like auto-completion when writing code.
The Community
I was back to school in 2018 and had connected with some of my friends who had a passion for software. Though, we never talked much since we were in different academic years. It was hard balancing both learning code and classwork. The two needed time to grasp. I was not willing to quit Engineering school to pursue Software. How would I convince my parents that I had a change in passion? They could have given me thousands of reasons why I am making a bad choice.
Same year Andela was offering scholarships on different tracks that are Web specialists, Mobile Web, and mobile application. Got a link to apply from a friend and applied for Web specialist. Being among the chosen candidates gave me more confidence to continue learning even though I was still studying for my undergraduate.
At the end of the course, we formed a group of developers that will come up with ideas and develop websites based on the best ideas. It was cool being in such a community because I learned a lot in connecting and collaborating. The project did not materialize at the end because of different priorities at that time.
Undecided
I did follow up on emerging technologies and read every article since I had taken a break from writing code. At the end of 2019, I engaged in academic writing to earn some money. It was not well paying and the jobs were not that reliable. At the start of the year, 2020 schools were closed and movement around the country was limited. Surviving was really difficult without any income at that time. My parents would pay most of my bills. However, I felt I needed an income. I went back to academic writing jobs.
Back at it
During this period, I got an opportunity to go back to coding, this time I had started using ReactJS although I had used to learn Angular before. Joined with a close friend we used to learn together although he was ahead of me. He introduced me to nodejs and taught me the basics. Some of the projects we had done had not materialized at the time the year was coming to an end.
June 2021 was back in school to finalize my education. I did less coding of websites and focused on my final year project. I had to learn the Arduino language. This was not much of a task since I had learned c programming.
It's 2022 I would improve my skills in writing code especially websites. I also want to start writing articles in line of my passion. Apart from writing articles to help the coding community at large, would also like to earn from it. Finally i would Thank @the_greatbonnie for the mentorship.
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