This being the genesis of documenting my journey in tech, I’d honestly like to say what an overwhelming experience it’s been for me, from feeling super pumped and optimistic to calling myself dreamy and fantastical for thinking I could learn these hard things. Okay, so where to begin…hmm, this shouldn’t be difficult🙂.

June 2022🚀

I wouldn’t say I dreamt up the idea of venturing into tech on my own, I had a spur, but like most in this field, I did have a passion for ‘everything computer’ and a fascination with typing away and seeing it all come to life in a webpage presentation or an application operation, it released feel-good hormones into my bloodstream. Then there was the issue of being jobless, idle and scared of being broke and poor in the nearest future with no marketable skill to save me. I had a friend who was already treading the waters by this time. He told me he also had a friend who was financially independent and doing well and was encouraging him to get into it. My friend was already learning HTML & CSS by then. I then figured this was my chance to do something I love and still get the takeaway of being able to pay bills with it somewhere down the line. So I started with an old but still usable desktop in my cousin’s shop at the time (it’s still there).

I downloaded NetNinja’s HTML & CSS entire crash course playlist from YouTube, and from then on, it was a beautiful blur. I went through the crash course in about a month and a half, and by completion, I had slightly below-average capabilities with both languages. I went ahead to download his CSS playlists on Animations, Flexbox, Styling HTML forms and Grids. After all these, I realized I needed some hands-on practicals to fine-tune my skills, so I went online again and started looking for boot camps and courses with certifications, I looked for those with highly ranked reputations, and I found freeCodeCamp.

I can confidently say that this is the best place to start your coding journey, after breezing through YouTube videos. It offered hands-on projects that helped me practicalize all my acquired knowledge, over and over again, until most syntaxes just stuck without effort. Programming, at whatever level of expertise, and with whatever script or technology, requires you to master the basics before you can ever become professional at it, there are no jumping steps, you’ll eventually have to come back. FreeCodeCamp helped me do just that, master the basics.

I didn’t start immediately, as I felt I needed to do a refresher with NetNinja’s crash course, so I did just that, and then went AWOL for about two weeks. The reason was, I had no laptop to work with. I needed a network-enabled computer to effectively go through freeCodeCamp, as it was fully online, but the desktop I was using then wasn’t, and I also couldn’t get a network adapter to fix the situation. It felt for a moment like I had come to the end of my journey, but I needed to continue because I didn’t want to regret giving up some years down the line. So I went ahead to request my cousin’s husband, and God bless his sweet generous soul, he came through for me about a month after my two weeks of inactivity. During this slumber period, I searched online for more boot camps and courses that I could undergo or undertake, but most of them required a computer so I just stuck with freeCodeCamp at the time. I also didn’t want to commit to so many courses that would end up overburdening me and burning me out, leaving me too busy and stressed out to focus on and grasp anything.

Fast-forward to getting the laptop, I started on freeCodeCamp immediately. I was on it every night, and whenever I was free during the day. Somewhere along the line, I got a message from my girlfriend telling me about a free software engineering program offered by ALX in partnership with Holberton Computer School (ALX has recently acquired Holberton), I was thrilled, to say the least. I applied immediately, got approved and was slated to start September 11. It was still about a month away, so I burrowed into freeCodeCamp as much as I could (thank goodness I did, I had no idea how time-consuming and overwhelming a software engineering program could be) before the commencement date. However, I wasn’t able to complete that before September 11^th, and so once again, I went on an unintentional break from HTML & CSS on freeCodeCamp.

ALX’s program was completely project-based, as I soon realized. I started learning how to navigate the Command Line in UNIX systems, did a bit of mindset training in-between, then moved on to Git operations, still being controlled from the UNIX Command-Line. After a while, I got to set up my virtual environment using Vagrant on my Windows pc (I’ll probably put up something about this soon: setting up Vagrant for a UNIX virtual environment on Windows). I then moved on to begin learning C. It was a lot more than I expected honestly, and often wondered if I was ever going to master this language properly, but you see, Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’m still mastering it 😉.

Now🕒🕺

We got done with our first sprint and commenced the second this year in January with Python (still on that now), while still brushing shoulders with some projects and tasks in C now and then. I have to say, the idea of Python being a high-level language is so evident in how much easier it is to understand than C which is low-level. Its syntaxes are more readable and less cryptic than C’s. Although I have to honestly admit, my experience with C (which is still ongoing) set a foundation for finding Python easier to understand. So maybe, when delving into turbulent waters in programming, starting with the ‘more challenging’ items might not be such a bad idea. I’ve met programmers who started with learning JavaScript in their Front-end Development journey, saying it made it easier for them to grasp HTML & CSS, but I think there’s no ‘best’ way to go about it, just hear other experiences, use that to figure out what works for you, and then stick to it.

Also, at the beginning of this year, via financial aid, I enrolled in Meta’s Front-end Developers course, offered on Coursera, another beautiful place to find resources that would help you start your tech journey and take it to the next level, bit by bit. I’m getting to learn a wider range of technologies related to HTML & CSS like Bootstrap and React while also starting to deal with the notable JavaScript. I’m also done with freeCodeCamp’s HTML & CSS boot camp and have commenced learning JavaScript there as well. So basically it’s a ‘single-student multiple-masters’ kind of scenario, with the upside of learning the same technologies from two viable sources,

Takes from my journey

I’ll list these out as points so it’ll be easy to follow:

🤔Stop thinking so much about it, just start. Humans have the propensity to over-consider things and sometimes end up spending all the time they might have used to cover good ground considering.

✏📒DYOR(Do Your Own Research). There is a plethora of information out there, including life stories and experiences. Some will boost your morale, and some might considerably destroy it. However, find out for yourself and weigh yourself against the challenge rather than rely on hearsay.

😌BE PATIENT! Yes, it calls for capitalization. If you are in such a hurry to learn, a lot of knowledge will elude you in the rush. Read between the lines and take notes, over and over again, as many times as it will take for you to grab a concept.

😗Don’t procrastinate. Believe me, you’re never going to do that thing on time if you don’t just push yourself to do it now. Maybe you’ll end up doing it weeks or months after, which is time lost if you ask me.

👆Take it one at a time. Most people just want to learn everything at once, hop on all the fast-moving trains, all at the same time. You’ll most likely end up getting nowhere as opposed to anywhere, a jack of all trades, master of none.

😥It’s hard, so expect discouragement. Oh boy will you get tired and frustrated, to the point of giving up. You might even slack a bit in progress. But hey, very few good things come easy, and even at that, their underlying come-up still require a good deal of hard work somewhere along the line. So, when you get down, you just have to get yourself back up, even when you absolutely don’t feel like it. This game is as psychologically intensive as it is physically.

👨🏼‍🤝‍👨🏼Have accountability partners. This I flopped on, and may still be flopping on currently. Not doing this might make it a little lonely for you, and in turn, a bit harder to find help when you can’t muster any yourself. Remember the saying? “**If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together”.

🦾Practice makes perfect. Programming isn’t some information like your name that can’t ever be forgotten once you’ve used it once or a couple of times, it goes away when you don’t revisit it regularly or often. Yes, the internet is every programmer’s best friend, as it’s impossible to always remember everything (even the best programmers in the world still refer to online sources when they forget, because they do lol), but you can’t forget what you don’t know very well or at all, so practice.

There are probably more of these where they came from, but these are key. I’m not saying I stuck to the book all the time, so I had to learn some the hard way, but you don’t. It’s an overwhelming field with ups and downs here and there, and we haven’t seen it all yet, but it’s always worth it. This is where I am now, and there’s still a lot of room to grow, so I’ll let you know what new things I discover in my next post. Keep coding💻✌😎!