Starting in tech I was advised to document my journey, 'how?' i asked, 'I don't even know what to write about.' So I got online and started looking for tips on how to go about this, and one piece that stood out for me was this article by Gary Vaynerchuk where he talked about documenting rather than creating. He says;

'.....I think it's much more fruitful to talk about your process than the actual advice you think you think you should be giving out.'

My fear was I didn't think i knew enough to start giving opinions and producing interesting content but the keyword here is a document. That's keeping track of progress or to record in detail, which can be anything. From my project documentation, to my daily life learning to code.

So here I am, starting with a quick preview of my background getting here. We'll begin with my secondary education, now growing up I didn't like reading not that I feared I wasn't brilliant or I won't understand, but i just didn't get around to being serious with books. Coming from a not-so-well-to-do background, my parents made education a top priority in fact it was second only to church. So much that it was the only way to get money from them, just think of an expense with books in it. I understand this from point of view, which is that school is the only way to make it out of poverty, and they aren't entirely wrong.

Coming from a generation where most people weren't privileged to have any form of formal education, most of the older generation in Nigeria, just like my parents grew up and saw how the educated folks ran virtually all spheres of the country and lived very comfortably. So it was ingrained in them that schooling was imperative for a better life. Wanting the best for their children no matter how little they could afford, education was made a non-negotiable rule; sort of.

So when I began to display signs of an unserious student by failing a class my mom made it quite clear to me that I would have to repeat that class whether I liked it or not. And so I did. She felt she had to be tough on us because of the area we grew up in, wasn't your average neighborhood. It was normal to experience daily fight breakouts, gunshots and robberies, in fact, our city at the time was very notorious for being violent. This was a time when teenage gangs were at their peak at least for my community. It wasn't out of place back then to see teenagers priding themselves on being part of one gang or another, it was intense. So in that regard, she was right to be hard and insistent on schooling.

Luckily for me, I scaled through secondary school without repeating any more classes. Repeating that class spurred me to see the potential I had. It was the first time I realized I was good, I could rub shoulders with the 'brilliant guys' in class and soon everybody started seeing me as one. But my problem remained; still wasn't taking my reading seriously. The night before an exam/test is my preferred time to read. That's the only time I read any book, which was just enough to get B/C and a few A's. With my position ranging from 3rd to 5th. Little did I know I was cultivating a poor reading habit that followed me to the university years later. It wasn't until it was too late that I realized. But that was just enough to get me an engineering degree in 2018 without any fail.

Getting to the university we were introduced to BASIC and then JAVA later on. Let's just say that these two courses made me reverence programming, for me, it was just too abstract to understand. Largely due to the fact that it was mostly theoretical, which included writing long boring lines of code on a blackboard with no practical session. This was because a good number of us students like me didn't have a computer and the school lab couldn't handle our large numbers.

So it's safe to say that my journey with code didn't start well.

After graduation like most graduates in Nigeria, I went in search of livelihood. I didn't care what field or job I'd get into I just wanted to make a living to survive and send something home for the family. But this would later prove to be counterintuitive, as most jobs in my country pay the bare minimum with no structure for progress. Meaning you can work all your life at a company and only get a raise maybe once or twice(if they're generous) as if that wasn't bad enough, there aren't available jobs to cater to our booming younger population. This meant that there were more people un/underemployed than they are good jobs available.

After about 2-3 years of working with no definite career path, I had to refocus. Looking at my life and where I wanted to go I knew this wasn't what i wanted out of life. Meeting with various people I respected and asking for advice I ended up choosing to broaden my skill set, as this would open up doors in the future. It wasn't an easy decision because the average young Nigerian is saddled with much responsibilities and have to work ten times harder than his agemates elsewhere. It still isn't but it's for the best and that's what matters. I had to stop chasing pennies and trying to survive, while ignoring the greater opportunities.

It wasn't until 2022 I started to get serious with my plan. I knew I had an interest in tech because I've always wanted to know how websites are built not just because I liked customizing things. It went beyond that, I wanted to build one and experience that creative feeling I had when designing images. I was good at photoshop so to speak, but I wasn't comfortable with just designs I wanted to do more. At first, I thought about UI/UX designing then after a couple of courses I realized it wasn't what i was looking for. Not that I wasn't going to be good at it but I didn't feel the spark you might say.

This lead me into a whole limbo of searching for a focus area, which lasted for some time, mostly because I was distracted by other life problems. I think most people transitioning to tech have this problem too, especially in this 'get-into-tech-pandemic-era', I haven't spoken to a lot of them but I'd say a good amount are having a hard time deciding where to fit in. So we tend to ask things like "how do I get into tech?" or "what language do I start with?". Later I found I was asking the wrong questions. For starters I needed to know what field I wanted to go into, Tech, as a discipline is very broad so specializing in a career path, is key. Knowing this, I went in search and finally made a good choice in late 2022.

After quitting my full-time job i decided to work part-time and learn coding on my remaining hours. This way I can keep afloat and pay for data and power while focusing on getting better at what I do. Which is to develop things I have an interest in, even as simple as making things blink and move(or so I thought). It's such a cool feeling having control of a computer system and writing and interpreting a language the computer understands.

In my next article, I'll talk about which field I settled for and why.

That's it for my journey so far; Thanks for reading.