My Mentee Journey at She Code Africa

She Code Africa is a community founded by Ada Nduka Oyom; She focuses on representing women equally across all career roles in technology.

I applied to participate as a mentee to learn Front End Development(ReactJS) in November 2019 and luckily, I was picked. I remember how elated I was when I received the mail. The duration for the program is three(3) months (cohort style) and mentees are paired with experienced individuals in various tech fields.

I was paired with Amarachukwu and we were assigned Nedy Udombat (mentor). The program officially started in January 2020. The first month was introductory, I revised Javascript Fundamentals and ES6 with the help of many resources Nedy shared with us. I learnt about React and how to work with Git. Every week, we worked on projects, I built a social card, a Tic-Tac-Toe game, learnt about local storage and form authentication. I also wrote articles to show my progress.

Nedy introduced me to a working space and assisted me with every difficulty I faced. In the second month, I learnt about state management using Redux, working with Apis and setting up react applications with Webpack. I worked on a counter app, a Todo app and a social card that manages data using Redux. Also, I learnt how to set up linters, code formatters, alert libraries, etc.

The third month, I learnt about testing React and Redux using Jest and Enzyme. Also, I read documentation about using the Spotify API and deploying react apps to Netlify. For my final project, I built an application that allow users search for songs on Spotify and add songs to their playlists. The project can be found here (https://ninify.netlify.com)

Anytime my code didn’t work.

The whole experience has been mind blowing, there were days I would spend hours trying to locate the errors in my code (only to find out I didn’t add a semicolon or name a constant properly). I am grateful to Nedy because he was always available to teach and correct me. Also, I am thankful for the opportunity She Code Africa gave me and I can’t wait to recommend this program to everyone interested.

Cheers!