My Code Adventure
Sometime in 2006, few months after I finished a one-year computer training program in a computer college in the Ojuelegba Area of Lagos. An elderly cousin, AKINLEYE ADEDAMOLA introduced me to HTML, I never knew if that was HTML 1, 2, 3 or 4. It was just HTML.
I could remember vividly, he made a simple web page displaying some stuffs about Osama bn Laden, and 9/11 using data he lifted from Encyclopedia Britannica. The class was very short, but he managed to introduce me to HTML header tags, image tags, and most interestingly, the marque tag.
Don’t ask me why marque was interesting, I was a real novice then.
Two years after, I seek university admission for Computer Science but was offered Mathematics. I was disturbed, I cried that I wanted to become a Software Engineer and not a Mathematician, but Damola was there for me once again, he advised me to go study Mathematics, that most of the founding fathers of computer science were mathematicians, He said I am going to be alright. He studied Physics himself.
I graduated from the University in 2013, taking only 5 programming courses (QBasic, C, C++, Fortran and MATLAB) and self-learning Java with a Tanimowo Fatai (Heftee). I tried putting my head around web development at that time, and everything I found pointed to WordPress (my little exposure though). I loved books so I got a copy of O'Reilly Media’s Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5 and later SitePoint’s PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja and they got me going a bit. I put together a WordPress site for a non-profit organization.
During the one-year mandatory youth service, I met Emdee Tiamiyu in Camp, he gave me my first copy of Visual Studio and he told me I should improve my coding skills, that I can do it. I joined the ICT CDS Group where we had people like Chilezie , Eluehike Chiedu and other awesome members, we had meetups every wednesdays where we learn about latest technologies from Programming, Networking to Virtual Reality.
I went back to school for a postgrad in Mathematics (maybe I was confused), but this time, I spent more time going through courses on MIT Open Courseware, Coursera, NewBoston and Edx combined than I attended my normal classes. From these resources, I learnt a lot more about Java, Python, R, Matlab and Programming for Computational and Applied Mathematics.
After postgrad, I applied for the Andela Fellowship (Class XIII I guess), got through to bootcamp, put on waitlist, called back when I was out of town, missed that opportunity (long story). I forged ahead, freelancing for Postgraduate Applied Mathematics and Engineering students, helping them attend to those places in their research where coding aptitude is required. During one of my trips to Ilorin (trying to complete some client projects), I discovered FreeCodeCamp, met Isiaka Fatiu (my best mentee) and a host of other fresh grads that wanted to venture into coding as a career.
My Andela experience showed me the difference between programming and software development (somebody will argue this I know), the thought systems I need to acquire to be where I want to be, and the important skills I needed to master.
Everything finally paid off, I joined Bunmi Akinyemiju’s Venture Garden Group as a Software Engineer in January 2017 and I couldn't agree less that;
Impossibility is nothing…
Thanks to everyone I mentioned and those I forgot to mention, some very good friends I met during the bootcamp, I will mention you in some future posts.
