“Programming is the closest thing we have to a super power”
— Anonymous
Of a truth, the closest thing we have to magic incantations, or super powers is the ability to punch a bunch of keys on a computer’s keyboard and boom! …an app, a mega platform or a universal service is born. This is what has intrigued me about coding and all software related means of solving problems.
“What does it mean to boot a computer?”
A couple friends of mine who had just began their first “computer science” class posed that question to me many years ago way back in primary 1. I struggled for a while trying to unravel the correlation between “boot” and “computer” and guess my reply…
Yes, I said that. To kick the lifeless box!
Fast forward 5 years when I would boot my first computer (a mini laptop) and that was it, I was hooked for life. I would spend hours clicking and exploring not that there was an internet connection, I was just intrigued by everything windows vista had to offer. From as far back as then (about a decade ago) I knew I would love to spend the rest of my professional life operating a computer.
This passion landed me in trouble many times than I can remember. Moving on to a boarding school, though not a rascal, there was only one instruction I could not obey, “do not touch the laptops.” I just couldn’t resist the temptation. The saddest of them being a day our mathematics tutor returned to the lab few minutes after he’d left only to find me working on 2 laptops, my leg on the table and his modem plugged in, I just wished the ground would open up at that instant, but it didn’t. What followed was a sad experience.
It was only a few years back, about 4 years, that I first heard the term programming. Up to that time I just knew I wanted to become a “computer person” when I grow up.
2017 was the magic year for me. I programmed a computer to output the sentence “Hello, World.” It was magical, I felt like an accomplished individual, it took a while before I shook off the euphoria. (It was written in c++).
In that instant, I knew I wanted more of this! I want to be able to instruct computers to do just about anything, I mean anything.
I would go on to sign up for CS50 (an introductory course to computer science by Havard university) on edx.org which really eased my way into the field (Many thanks to @David J. Malan and his team). Though now in the university and juggling lot’s of courses per semester, the feeling from that “Aha” moment everything I finish a pset has kept me going.
Having been exposed to alot of innovations in the sector I have become a believer in the digital revolution and would love to have a front row sit when it becomes a reality. Many thanks to Andela Nigeria’s learning community, I’ve leverage various opportunities to gain basic knowledge in HTML, CSS & Javascript for front end developement(though it wasn’t as fun as I had hoped), Java and Xml for android development and python for machine learning (this been the cool part).
With each bit of knowledge, every additional line of code and the cool stories I read on this platform, twitter and hear at meetups, I would love nothing more than to be a professional software developer, this is the cool life!
Going beyond the regular tutorial videos and lessons on the net, I would love to feed my passion with a well structured and intense learning path so as to explore software engineering in depth and not just be another “self taught web designer” or “mobile app developer” or anything less, I want the full package.
