MY JOURNEY AS A NEWBEE DEVELOPER
Five months ago, I was an independent developer with no guidance what so ever. All my project ended up failing and it was getting frustrating for me. Tutorial after tutorial I got a little better I was not there yet, my learning pace was slow and meaningless.
When I finished my ordinary diploma I decided to sit down and plan on how I will face the challenges that where blocking me as a developer, so I started reading articles on newbies developer from different parts of the web so as to gain a hint on where to start and which technologies are popular, it took me four to six hours reading different article on the best practices a programmer and developer should follow, and just like that I had a map to my success as a developer. After getting the map I queued the languages I was supposed to learn. During this time, I got very interested in web development and deeply engaged in it and got to loving it.
My journey with web development wasn’t easy since it is ever-growing and to keep up you have to be skilled in many areas so as to incorporate the new concepts that kept on rising, to do this, I had to think quicker and smarter so as to prevent from reading on blind. To go at a pest that is both exciting and full of new experiences. A really good example is when I was learning angular and head for the first time about injection dependencies, I was surprised and terrified at the name and the concept but as I got deeper I found it was a concept that is used even by other languages like laravel and that gave me the motivation to dig in more and read more articles on the web. After 2 to 3 hours I was back on the wagon headed to the next challenge thrown my way. Three months later I was a JavaScript pro in my own small world
A friend reached out to me and told me about Andela and I was not much convinced, though he told me a lot, in my mind, it was still a fairy tale dream and I decided not to even give it a thought. The funny thing is when I was tired from reading articles and doing my small projects I decided to give it a look just to make my friend happy. After a five minutes skimming, I was more than interested with Andela, I wanted in and I was searching for a way in but to my surprise it was easy and I took the shot. one week later I got my home study curriculum which opened my eyes to a lot of new things I never even thought off. This made my interest grow even stronger I was determined to pursue this interest and gave it my all.
The home study from Andela showed me a new world and I was determined to see it to the inch, I studied the home study and understood Andela’s values. The more I wanted to know about Andela the more I wanted to be a part of something bigger than me, to collaborate with others like me who are passionate about being developers. Andela ’s values showed me that I can be more, do more and exceed my expectation and for that, I was inspired to learn more.
As I read the home study and the challenges that followed my mindset grew in a short time than when I started this journey on my own, this showed me that, if I worked closely with a diverse group of people I would accomplish more, grow beyond my current capacity and for that I was ready to walk the extra mile. People become great if they have effort in whatever they are doing and this is true as far as there is open criticism and its acceptance, collaboration with the people around you and a passion that drives you to aspire for more in life. I knew I will get this if I collaborate more with people and as far as my mind went I so a chance to grow with Andela.
So far I have learned about planning out a project before implementing it. listing what’s needed, plan on how to implement this needs and finally implementing them. Testing application for bugs is really challenging if the project was not thought out and I try my best to plan each and everything in a project so as to know what is expected at the end and that helps me to know what to test and expect in a code. And this was all made possible through collaboration with colleagues and a lot of references from Andela home study.
Version control is another thing that was very challenging for me but after a deep dive into the home study I was able to create, add, commit and push my projects to GitHub repo and it was a great experience for me because in the past I had to upload my code online for safe keeping. But git and GitHub have shown me a great way of handling my project through they are version control.
That’s all for today, thanks for reading.