From the Vault : Dear upcoming techie
It’s sad to think that coming up in the tech world is much more difficult now than it will ever be. The environment is ever shifting and catching up seems like it’s’ close to impossible. What seemingly works for others, might seem not to work for you. That’s okay, worry not. I have been there too and as much as I barely reached my potential, the lessons that I learnt throughout will help you avoid some of the obstacles that hindered my progress. Be sure to tune in as I narrate my journey in this article.
Of course, you are wondering who I am and why I should bother sharing this with you. Well, I am Brandon T. Bande (first of his name) and in the past three or so years I have tried my hand in tech with limited success. See my biggest asset is my brain, and given a problem I can draft a solution using what I know in record time. Note I mentioned what I know there, because more often than not I have been limited by the scope of my knowledge, but that hasn’t stopped me from standing out of the pack a bit. In my own words, I would say I am a Steve Jobs without a Wozniak. A pretty bold claim but anyone who attempts to prove otherwise would have a hard time finding facts to do so.
I am a Steve Jobs without a Wozniak-me
So first let’s revisit my past. The first time I touched a computer was back in 2010, at an internet café. I knew how to use a phone and how to navigate the internet with a phone but then translating those skills to a computer was really a challenge for me back then. I spent the 30 minutes I had paid for staring at the screen and just pressing around without enjoying the value for my money. The internet café personnel wanted to charge me extra for assistance and I was not in a position to pay for the lessons. Little did I know that this was just a glimpse of what the future held for me.
The next time, I touched a computer was doing lessons in Microsoft Office packages. My group was the first cohort to be allowed near a computer at my school and as such the rules were so strict that even changing a wallpaper was a crime punishable by death (Wait, I might have exaggerated a bit but it warranted a heavy punishment). Luckily for me the tasks we were given were a skate in the park for me and I had time to tinker around. And that is how I learnt most things about a computer. Just tinkering around and breaking a few things along the way.
The next encounter I had with getting into tech. I mean the blue blood stuff not the Muggles stuff, was during the MS Access lessons and the curriculum paid little attention on those so we never dove deep into Access and it was years later when I realised that in a good setting this could have been my in into the tech world. Unfortunately, it took a girl to get me into tech and most techies hate that story because it is more fun than how they cracked games and all. Mine has forbidden love, Cupid’s touch and a little help from the neon gods just to impress someone I dearly crushed on.
So, you see, it was a typical boy meets girl, boy likes girl scenario and boy didn’t know how to impress girl though he had a laptop. My tinkering had already started getting me some recognition for being an IT guru, but I couldn’t impress the girl troubleshooting networks or installing drivers, right. So, I went on YouTube and searched a trick that I could do with my computer and it showed me this matrix like effect that could be done using batch programming. For days I learnt how to create it and the beauty about it was that it only needed the preinstalled notepad application and boom I had it working, with my name instead of the 1s and 0s.
Man, I am reminiscing a lot but let me cut the story short. So, after that trick, the guys noticed it and talked about it (at times in front of the girl), so it was a near miss and that brought me to my first encounter with writing logic. I then wrote a small batch script that prompted a user to enter their name, and then it would give their date of birth…… Only that? Well, no. There was a minor feature (as the techies call minor changes) . If my crush entered her name, it was supposed to give her a hidden message. It’s a pity that the script was never delivered but years later when I was seriously introduced to programming, it was easy to catch up on the concepts. And in the next article as I outline how to enter the tech space, I will explain more. After my romantic attempts, I would set aside the technical tech side until years later.
Now today, I am a jack of a couple of trades, master of none wallowing in a boulevard of unfinished and unstarted revolutionary initiatives, some innovative and some adaptive. And I would not want you sitting next to me hence me sharing my story. So join me for the next article on how to dive into tech an hopefully you learn from it and go further than I did.
