My ALC 3.0 in a nutshell
I remember my days before I had anything to do with the development of the tech ecosystem over here (in case you do not know, I am talking about Abuja, Nigeria), I was your typical “neighborhood” freelancer, build new applications for clients, maintaining old ones and trying to improve my technical skills through sites like Youtube, Udemy, Pluralsight e.t.c.
The first meetup I ever attended was around September 2017, which was a WecodeNG meetup and I happened to meet with other amazing developers. This particular meetup opened my eyes to the immense work that was already being done as regards community building and the amount of work that still needed to be done. And that was when I decided to play my own part.
Fast forward to early 2018, a friend of mine and also a developer, David Kezi, asked if I would like to mentor learners for the ALC 3.0. A little story about ALC (Andela Learning Community), it’s a programme that extends from Andela (Yeah the same) that started when they realized a need to provide more opportunities to talented individuals who were willing to get into development. Basically, they try to partner with some larger companies to sponsor a large number of learners for online courses that would otherwise be really expensive to afford.
For ALC 3.0, they partnered with Google to sponsor 500 learners to take part in selected Nanodegree courses on Udacity, but in order to select the learners, they accepted a really large number of learners (over 15,000 to be somewhat precise) for the first phase of the programme and then their performance in this part will be used to screen learners down to the needed 500.
Back to my story, David wanted me to mentor the learners during the programme (he was also a facilitator) and I was happy to do that. Coincidentally, another friend, Auwal, told me about the programme, he advised that I could apply as a learner and also as a mentor, but he warned that it will be tasking having to balance the two roles.
To skip the long story, I went through the whole programme, helping learners and also trying to complete my own coursework (really hard BTW) and I was eventually selected to be part of the 500 learners for the complete Nanodegree programme which would span for a period of 4 months (Mobile Web Specialist).
The programme focused mainly on improving mobile web experience by building a Progressive Web Application. But the programme also focused on other areas like improving and measuring web performance using tools like the Chrome developer tools, debugging issues that affect web performance, tools used to build modern applications, career improvement strategies and a lot more. Below is a summary of everything I was able to learn during the programme:
WEB PERFORMANCE
We went through different strategies for tracking the performance of web applications using the Chrome developer tools, like analyzing Lighthouse audit scores, coverage reports, using the performance tab on the chrome dev tools to know the performance impact of processes like painting, scripting e.t.c. on your web applications. One feature that stuck with me was using the coverage feature to measure the amount of unused JS and CSS that your application ships with.
For improving web performance, we went through ways or methods that can be used to optimize your JS code and also stuff that could cause performance issues over time (e.g. modifying layout in a loop).
PWA
For the whole period of the course, we went through every little detail required to build and ship a performant progressive web application, from the necessary lifecycles to using the cache API, to indexedDB, push notifications, background sync e.t.c. We didn’t actually build a PWA from scratch, but we worked on converting a normal web app into a PWA (which is what usually happens in the real world).
MODERN TOOLS
This was kind of my favorite because I have already been using Webpack for some time, we went through various tools but the section that stuck was the use of bundlers during development.
CAREER BUILDING
In my opinion, this was the hardest one because I was always terrible at selling myself, people usually helped me with that. Plus I was an introvert, but this part of the programme really helped me gain some confidence and now I can deliver a killer elevator pitch (not bragging). We also worked on our LinkedIn and GitHub profile. This also allowed clean up the various readme files for a majority of my repositories and also try to contribute more to open source projects.
What have I gained since completing the Nanodegree you ask? Well, since I got the certificate I’ve had the opportunity to speak at a conference (Devfest), and also multiple communities events (WecodeNG, Facebook Developer Circle), I’ve had the privilege to contribute to open source projects like React Native, I even landed a consulting contract (Modern tooling and Web application optimization). In all, I am most proud of and grateful for the number of people I’ve able to reach both directly and indirectly. And I don’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.
Finally, some might ask why I decided to write this article, it’s more or less an appreciation article to show my gratitude for the opportunity given to me by both Google and Andela as it wouldn’t have been possible for me to learn this much in such a short time. I really do hope there is an ALC 4.0. where companies like Google can provide opportunities to more people.
