Hi, my name is Shahzana and I am 26 years old.
Family Life
I grew up with both parents and two siblings: an older and a younger brother. As the only girl in my family, I wasn’t always “pampered.” My parents have always been there for me, stood by my side, and were advisors most of the time. They always guided me the best they could, educationally or just in everyday life. They are more like friends to me than parents, and as a family-oriented person, this is beautiful to me.
The Person That I Am
I am an introvert.
I appreciate and enjoy the simple things in life, and I am a huge bookworm and enjoy hiking.
I am also a little bit of a feminist, but only from the perspective that women are not suffering injustice. I always speak my mind and, sometimes, this can be seen as rude.
I love animals, cooking, and baking. Yeah, I bake a lot, and I do it most of the time when I’m under stress.
I feel I’m a bit weird and sometimes people don’t understand what I’m thinking about or what I’m trying to say…I just look at life from a different perspective.
I’m also getting married soon, and this is a beautiful story about how I defeated depression.
I’ll tell you about that in another blog.
School Life
To be honest, I don’t like to study, but I love to learn.
I know this is why I had difficulties focusing in school. I wouldn’t be interested in whatever the teachers were forcing me to study; however, when I was interested in something, I would rather learn more about that.
For my mom, a Primary teacher, this would frustrate her because she would wonder why I would act so uninterested in my studies. Poor Mom! I understand her now.
My mom’s biggest fear was that I would turn out to be like my dad’s sisters; housewives! In the end, I would compromise and take whatever classes I was forced to take. Fortunately, once high school was over, it was time for University. I chose a graphic designer course after taking my
dad’s advice, and somehow ended up in a programming and coding course.
Just imagine…
For someone who never knew the basics of those things, it was a big dilemma.
But as classes went by, I understood more and more what I was being sucked into. For the first time in my life, I was…happy. I grew so much interest in the programming classes. My first HTML page was a mess, but it was fun for me. Slowly as we proceeded into web development, I started loving it, and later on, fell in love with it.
The Real World
After struggling to find a place for an internship during my last year at University, I found someone who was willing to take me in to see what I was able to do. He was satisfied with my work and let me occupy his front-end development work. On my own, it was difficult for me to know what I
was supposed to do in several circumstances. But being independent helped me to learn so much. This was the best work experience, until now.
After about a year and a few months, I decided to move on because the work was becoming too
monotonous and I needed new challenges.
I went to a French company, big mistake! I had the worst time ever there because the development procedure was different from what I used to do.
Firstly, the job did not require any web development skills to do “website building” for its clients. They simply made us copy and paste content into pre-built templates. They also had a quota of four websites for us to complete per day, and because of this, everyone was in a race. There was no personal touch or customization to the websites and they were not using any development
skills…nothing! Even more frustrating, the environment was like a system with a fixed time for everything, so I was always under pressure. It was killing my enthusiasm for what I loved doing and so, I decided to flee from there.
Two months past and I received a proposal from a Mauritian company to work as a front-end developer. When I started there, I was so happy because I was doing what I wanted to do — I was coding websites from scratch.
But then, the working environment degraded. My colleagues were leaving one by one because of the strict conditions we were put through.
So, I started applying to job postings. Every day, it was hard for me to wake up and go to work, there was no motivation, but I still wanted to do the things that I loved. This was conflicting and disturbing me.
Now
I just started working at DX Team, and it is a big change for me.
I have been thrown into a different environment, meeting different people from different countries with different perspectives. The work environment is something that I was looking for and it suits me well. As the front-end developer, I’m happy to be in charge of what I’m doing in terms of web-
site structure, colour schemes, and everything else. I can finally make my own decisions and not be forced into doing designs that only management wants, so I have more freedom. The work at DX Team is different because of the different goals the company has and it seems exciting and interesting.
Last Thoughts
I always lived by the quote “ Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” But I realised that the work we do is not the only thing that’s important, but it’s the environment we work in and the people we work with that’s important too. Also, we must not let people crush the ambition that we have.
At this stage in my life, I think we all have to seek what we love to do…something that helps us keep moving forward, something that inspires us.
We may not find it in the early stages, but hopefully, we will find it later in life.
