Today I shall talk about a particular side of me that I rarely ever bring up and that is Developer Dami. It all started after I came back home from Dubai. You see, I was not attending my classes over there and as a result, I was told that I was going to repeat that course. Said course was journalism.
During that period, I suffered from depression without knowing it and that was partially why I would refuse to attend most of my classes and ended up getting a poor attendance record. Yes, it was that bad.
My mum brought me back home to Nigeria as she did not want to waste any more money on my overseas studies. My aunt suggested that I try to enter the tech industry as I tend to mess around with my laptop around.
Now let me make something clear here; just because someone plays with their computer a lot does not automatically make said person an expert in computer science. I still do not understand where Nigerians get that logic from.
Either way, I naively agreed and registered at Aptech Maryland. My mum paid for the tuition fees. I struggled throughout as I did not know half of what they were teaching us, talkless of understanding any jack.
I was new then and was completely baffled by everything. For starters, I was like "What is HTML? What is Java? Like what?!" I did not put that much effort into anything and got decent grades. That is where my mentor Mr. Pius Owolabi comes in. He put me in check even though, I will admit, I gave him a bit of a rough time.
Another issue with me back then was that I was so impatient and was forming ITK. Like people would be advising me to do things a certain way and I would rudely ignore their warnings. I have gotten into trouble with that over the years.
Eventually, I ended up graduating from my online degree course at the University of Hertfordshire with a mere pass. Yes, I did not get a First class or second class. That was partly because I did not really study that hard and also because I realized at that part how far behind I truly was. The problem with Aptech's system is that whichever university that accepts your diploma expects you to know everything when in reality, Aptech never truly scratched the bare surface of computer science meaning that you literally have to figure things out yourself and that can be pretty irritating at times especially if you are still new to the tech community.
I quit the tech scene for years and tried focusing on being a writer. So far no gigs but I have not completely lost hope. Getting accepted for VBank's Makeathon has kind of rekindled my love for tech again. I did not even expect to get picked due to my lack of experience. Now I am going to teach myself computer science from scratch and learn the fundamentals, things that we were not taught in Aptech or even Hertfordshire.
My major challenge was where to start. What programming language to use. I stumbled upon a Python tutorial and I have read in a lot of blog posts and even some YouTube videos mentioned that Python is a great place to start for developers. For web developers, focus on the foundations of HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the first couple of months and then move on to other frameworks.
My advice to any new techie is to do some research into the tech space. Buy those courses that you need and take them seriously. Watch them every day and note things do and also practice, practice, practice. I have just started on my journey and I am both excited and nervous at the same time. Let's see how things go from here in the next 3-4 months.