Codeversary

On 6th June, 2019, a year ago, armed with the faulty family laptop in a cloth satchel. I walked through the doors of Soliz House, took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked to my first coding class at Outbox Hub. Prior to that day I had only interacted with Visual Basic (which nearly decimated any interest I had in coding), see its taught at my university as part of the Introduction to Programming but in my opinion it was harrowing to say the least.

Our learning facilitator, J Edison Abahurire seemed like a tough guy at the start but as we went on we realized he was pretty cool. He was pretty patient with me most of the time. I had a faulty machine and I couldn’t complete tasks as fast as the rest of my counterparts did or move at the same pace, but he made the experience almost smooth. I enjoyed class on some days. I recall the patience with which he introduced most of us to the Command Line Interface (CLI) on Windows and Linux, then introducing us to Github and gitbash. Seeing that black screen that only yielded to commands was admittedly daunting, but with time it became one of the things I do enjoy when I sit at my computer to work. J Edison Abahurire took us through our first fork on Github (he gave us a link to one of his repositories and let the whole class fork), we cloned the repo and were able to learn how to pull, merge, add, stage, set up a repository and even branch and collaborate as teams. Many of these tasks tend to elude my mind but they do make things much easier for me.

Photo by Richy Great on Unsplash

Our cohort included people with disabilities and I can’t stress how much fun it was for me learning new things and interacting with them on a daily was for me. Learning how to sign good morning, the sign language alphabet and remembering to be inclusive in what I do to better accommodate people who find challenges in tasks I find menial was definitely a page turner. In addition to all this we had lightning talks where everyone spoke about topics they were passionate about or things that they thought everyone should know, these made mornings something to look forward to.

My first code notes.

For our final project, my team and I made a sort of shopping site for lingerie, we called it Linger. Here is a link to our github repo, please feel free to contribute where you can. We made that repo when we were starting out so I believe the code is still wanting. I missed the demo day, but my teammates did exceedingly well.

I went on to join the Andela Women in tech program in October, 2019. I wrote about it in my 2019 rundown, and I was graced to get into a space of people just like me and see how learn and grow as whole despite the challenges they face. I like the occasional swag they’d give us and the food…God, yes the food!

Notebook I got from the Andela Women In Tech Program, my code notes and laptop.

Along the way I tried my hand at almost every sort of tech I could get my hands on, I tried JavaScript frameworks and libraries (React, Node, more JQuery). I tried my hand at Python and loved it, but sadly have not mastered it. I used resources from Progate (which you should most definitely check out), and found that I was having a really good time with code. Around that time, I got a new laptop! Yey! When school resumed a few weeks after that, I was mostly sorted, I took the Python elective and I actually had a machine to code with.

Progate for the win!

The Google Andela Developer Scholarship Program was also undeniably helpful, there was a wealth of knowledge for developers of all walks. I took the Mobile Web Specialist Path. As a person with a non Computer Science background, it was pretty comprehensive and even though I did not get into the project phase, I learnt a ton and I am still learning. I also took on the free classes offered by Harvard CS50 and Edx, I took my time learning and ended at ORMs and APIs.

My biggest takeaways from this year have been:

• Learning is continuous. Make an effort to build the knowledge you’ve got. Stay on the lookout for resources that you can learn from. There’s a wealth of knowledge on Medium, DEV, Hashnode and online platforms, most of it is free!
• Community is important. Endeavor to join local developer communities like Google Developer Groups, Facebook Developer Circles, She Code, Python Communities and many others. Majority of the help when you’re stuck and mentorship will come from these, and having people who you can relate with is one thing no one should miss out on. Not forgetting the meetups where you can get all the free food, t-shirts, opportunities and live code events.
• Share knowledge. You never know how important each snippet of info you collect is to someone else, the only way you learnt how to code was because someone took time to document it. Document and share on blogs, tweets, take challenges. Share your knowledge on Stack overflow , its a wonderful place for you to get any sort of code related help.
• Challenge yourself. There are a number of challenges that can help you form habits around code and tech. The most popular one is #100DaysOfCode on Twitter, but there’s also #30DaysOfCode by Wes Bos, you can check it out on the site.
• Take a break. When you feel overwhelmed with code, bugs and all the things that come with coding. Be kind to yourself, switch off and regroup.

I will ship this to my Hashnode Account too where I will drop technical articles too, thanks for reading this far. Leave a clap behind please, and be on the lookout for more of my pieces. Cheers!