Till the middle of this year, my learning journey was pretty much non-existent. Sure, I was in College majoring in Software Engineering but that was where it ended. Everything I knew was what I was taught in my classes and I thought that was okay, but it really wasn’t. I was limiting myself from actually bettering myself in so many ways.
Then a few months ago, one of the club members in this tech club I was in shared a link about the Google Africa Developer Scholarship which offered different learning paths such as Android, Web Development and Cloud. I took an interest in Android Development as I had always owned android phones and that seemed like the best option since I didn’t really like Web development or Cloud at the time. I chose to apply and that one decision changed my life more than I ever thought it would.
Suddenly, I was being opened to a vast world filled with so many programming languages and so much tech content on Pluralsight that I was fascinated and I knew I could never go back to how things were. I found myself learning so much from what I was being taught in any of my classes. It started with learning Kotlin and immediately fell in love with it and how it works. The syntax was less complicated than C++ and it was so much fun to learn. But it didn’t stop there, after I got exposed to tech twitter 3 months ago, I finally decided to give web development a try.
I learnt the basic HTML and CSS on FreeCodeCamp along with starting the 100DaysOfCode Challenge which I had to pause when school work got too demanding. Learning HTML and CSS turned out to be fun, after that I bought some books on HTML and JavaScript and learnt even more. I learnt about how to create my own website with just HTML and style it with CSS which was cool to me. After all, I had never created something so this was all still exciting. When I was sure I had learnt enough, I started working on the projects from FreeCodeCamp which was really a test of what I had learnt but thankfully I was able to finish the projects and received my first certificate. It was my first ever certificate for completing something. Suddenly, everything was starting to fall into place. I wanted to learn more and more about a lot of things which I have to admit is not easy. There is no way you can learn everything at once.
I watched tutorials on YouTube learning more and more about CSS as it wasn’t my strongest point while also learning about HTML5 and the cool things you could do. All while juggling college work which was starting to feel a little repetitive. I wasn’t learning anything in my Web Dev Class because we had only ever had two classes in months but were still expected to write assignments and tests which just didn’t seem fair but I didn’t complain because I had learnt so much on my own that there was no point in complaining.
But I didn’t stop there, once I was done with the responsive web development course on FreeCodeCamp and finished the book HTML & CSS, I jumped into learning JavaScript and resumed learning Kotlin because I had side lined it so much that I was afraid I was going to forget what I had learnt all those months ago.
I made my first version of my portfolio using SASS and it turned out better than I had expected considering I had no idea what I was doing but I knew what I wanted. I wanted to learn and stop feeling like such an imposter every time someone asked me for help with anything programming related.
So much was going on but I still made time to learn something every day and even though I was no longer participating in the 100DaysOfCode Challenge, I was still learning at my own pace. Picked up UI designing and created a twitter login clone as well as a music app UI, it felt great because I had always thought I was going to stick with backend because that I knew I wasn’t as creative with a lot of things especially considering the work, I had been doing in my Multimedia class wasn’t all that great but front-end and UI had taken my interest.
Some basic projects I’ve made in the few months I have been learning and some can be found on my GitHub profile:
• Popping Penguin using HTML and plain CSS view
• A Counter App using HTML, CSS and JavaScript view
• Portfolio using HTML and SASS and some JavaScript view
• A blackjack game using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• A basic calculator using C++
• A dice roller app using Kotlin and Android Studio
• A birthday app using Kotlin and Android Studio
YouTube channels, Pluralsight, FreeCodeCamp, Scrimba, MDN documents, W3Schools, Hashnode as well as Twitter have been great resources in my learning journey because I would have never otherwise learnt so much on from school.
At the start of the year, I would not have been able to say I was able to create anything from scratch. But now, I want to be a full-stack developer and software engineer developing apps as well as websites and writing. I’m going to continue learning and adding enough things to my list while also making sure that I am comfortable with it. There is still so much more to learn and I will keep on learning. I chose to start learning and that has been the best decision I have made this entire year.
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