My Journey as a Software Engineer
TLDR; It’s all about me, and might not seem interesting to you as I’m not a great guy yet. I’m just someone who just feels like sharing how I got into coding— steps I took, jobs I got and turned down, contributions I made to the community, and how I think the future would be like for me.
It’s so strange to think that I got into coding because I was bored. Yes, that’s right! “I started coding out of boredom”. I’m 22 years old now. It all started from when I was 14 years old. Yeah, 8 years ago right? That’s around the time my Dad got my first computer.
I was this kind of person that didn’t fit in any circle, I never really bonded with anyone in school. I was always on my own. I got a little better in my senior secondary school years but believe me I was still unbearable, even to myself.
One fateful day(around 2011) I saw a link a guy posted “aDomainName.tk”. I wowed. I was surprised it wasn’t a dotcom. I decided to check out the site, and saw it was a forum. The forum had all sort of things like downloading images, videos, games, and so on. One could also create topics, give shoutouts and so on. I was intrigued.
The wizardry stance
I just kept on surfing till I got to the footer and saw “Powered by wapka.mobi”. I decided to go check wapka.mobi out. Found it was a Content Managment System (CMS) for building mobile web pages. I decided to create one and give a shot at adding some suggested items. It was fun. I loved it. What next? I wasn’t satisfied because the website I visited was way beautiful than that. I decided to search for what makes a website beautiful, I saw it was Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and W3School shed more light on it. And luckily for me, I saw a place to add CSS rules to Wapka, I gave it a shot and it all made sense. I felt like a freaking wizard, for once. I was so happy!
I did say it was boredom, but was it? I’m not sure. But whatever it is, boredom was the trigger. Because if I fit in and associated more with people around me, I wouldn’t have picked up coding. No way!
Dream developer takes a chance
I moved on to another CMS (JohnCMS). It was a lot different from Wapka as it gave a lot of control to the developer i.e. self-hosting. And with self-hosting, you could do anything, really. It was operated using Hypertext Preprocessor(PHP) and MySQL. Yes, that’s how I knew about PHP. I never knew what a programming language was, but the scripts and queries did seem logical and I was able to make some changes to them. Oh dear, I changed the LIMIT’s in the MySQL queries, copied some PHP code to some file to achieve the same thing, messed with the .htaccess file which I later fixed with help online. Damn! I knew not what programming was, but I was a developer ^_^
Along the line, I knew it was a programming language, but never had an interest in learning it. I did look up on Google to see what programming is, and how to go about it, then it brought up Python. I decided to learn Python with some resource I saw online. It was fun, really. And all seemed like a trick. I finished up with the basic stuff I saw on Python, then moved on to a different things. There came JavaScript by W3School.
It wasn’t fun.
It was horrible.
It made me question if I had made the right choice in life.
Most of what was taught then was DOM, like seriously? Freaking DOM! I couldn’t grab any of it. I just left it and stayed off coding for some while. Later went on to changing the Wapka style sheets, because that gave me joy.
The play continues
I played around like that till 2013/2014 when I watched the movie “The Social Network”. Yeah! Yeah!! That one about Mark Zuckerberg. It inspired me to get back into proper programming. I decided to check out what he used in building Facebook and saw it was PHP. It did feel nice because I was already copying-pasting PHP codes, so it piqued my interest.
I signed up for a PHP lesson at thenewboston.com by Bucky Roberts. I loved the way Bucky teaches coding, the way he uses “Bacon”, “Tuna”, as examples. I enjoyed every bit of it. I was beginning to feel more like a programmer. I decided to see how far I would go in this so I created mycodeng.com. It doesn’t exist anymore but can be viewed at Wayback, which was created to be a community of developers merging both features of Facebook and Twitter. I did copy most of the features available then, at least, and added some new features for developers.
While in school around that time, I met some folks which were also inspired by “The Social Network” movie. We then came up with YCTConnect, that is, Yaba College of Technology Connect, for students. It also doesn’t exist anymore and can be viewed using The Wayback Machine. We had some users use the website till we decided to let go of it because of Legal issues we thought we’d face using the name “YCT”. We didn’t really know how we’d go about it anymore. I later took some PHP job, mainly final year projects which fetched me some money, and all.
The learning groove
At the end of 2014, I attended my first Hackathon with Tobi Oladele(TED) and a classmate at CCHUB. It was fun! I took my first cup of Coffee, and also my first and only time of drinking RedBull. We wrote SHOP (the app we decided to present), for two straight days. TED was the lead. We tried our best but we didn’t win :(
Fast forward to 2015, I heard about freeCodeCamp which was introduced to me by my neighbour (Tobi Okunuga). He (Tobi) played a great role in my life as regards learning to code, even before FreeCodeCamp. I didn’t mention that he was the one that helped in downloading most of the materials I used then. So, I started learning to code properly using the well-aligned curriculum FreeCodeCamp offered. I enjoyed every bit of it. Even when I got to the JavaScript part, it was all fun. I loved it and got really into JavaScript.
I went through FreeCodeCamp June 2015 — July 2016, roughly 1 year. It taught me a lot of things; It’s okay to use frameworks (I literally built a lot of stuff from the scratch without following any style rule, principle, and so), version control systems using git, linting, code testing, algorithms, open source, and a lot of things. You probably should check out their new curriculum.
Opensource-ry
FreeCodeCamp made me an OpenSourcerer. I literally didn’t know what open source meant at the time and that got me creating open source libraries and contributing to several repositories. Although I had little challenges contributing to some open source project I care about because of my computer, I was able to create tiny libraries and give myself some online presence. Yeah, open source got me an invitation to speak at Google I/O Extended 2017 on Progressive Web App, Facebook Developer Circle Lagos (which I later joined as a ReactJS Learning Community Manager) on Apollo GraphQL. It also got me really cool follows :) Like Jason Miller (Follows me on GitHub, and Twitter). Jason is one of the best guys out there. I also got followed by Prosper Otemuyiwa, Sarah Drasner, Christian Nwamba, and some others. These folks are really awesome, glad to have them in my life.
After completing the FreeCodeCamp curriculum, I got a skype call from the COO of FreeCodeCamp, Michael D. Johnson. He asked how I felt about the programme and a few other questions. I got another call the following week for a job offer which I turned down because I felt I wouldn’t be able to handle both school and work, and yeah, I wasn’t really interested in making money out of it. Several others came in which I also turned down because they didn’t offer remote opportunities. So I kept on just contributing to open source.
Later around 2017, I got a message from Prosper Otemuyiwa asking about work, which I replied that I wasn’t working because I have little to no work experience and the thing with school too. He advised me to take some, which I did. I successfully worked alongside schooling, which didn’t affect my academic and work performance at all. I later took a part-time job at Conectar where I got to work as a proper software developer.
It’s been all fun anyways, even if school didn’t play any part in making me a better engineer, I kept on learning and following new technologies. Although PluralSight says I’m an Expert in both JavaScript and ReactJS, it doesn’t mean I am.
The Future
I plan to get a job at a big company that would give me the opportunity to connect more with developers as I have always been doing with open source. So, maybe a Developer (Advocate|Relations) or Tech Evangelist. I also plan to challenge myself to expand the way I think about solutions and learn to automate many things.
Conclusion
My advice to new developers is to never stop learning, attend meetups to build connections; Facebook Developer Circle Lagos is best at that because we have several units (Design, Writing, React, Startup Discovery), and so on, which makes it easier to reason with like minds and collaborate with one another. You should also learn to reach out to other developers for advice, especially professionals. By doing of all these, you’d be able to achieve more than I did in less than 2 years.
Between, I’m open to any of the positions listed above, or a Front End Developer position, maybe at Netflix or some awesome company. Reach out to me on Twitter, if you have a cool offer for me. Thanks!
I don’t mind some claps too, yeah!
