Road To Tech: African Self-taught Developer Story

Yeah, I know I took a while to get this one out. For those who have been following me recently on Twitter, you know I just got my first job in tech which has been amazing up till this point🥳. Thank you guys for all the support throughout my journey. So in this post, I'm going to be sharing my journey from how I got interested in tech up till getting my first job and everything in-between. Let's get into it!

How I Got Into Tech

Right from boyhood, I've always loved everything science and engineering. It was always(and still is) my dream to become a Mechanical Engineer cuz I loved the idea of building machines, cars, and stuff. Nothing else interested me pretty much. For me, it was Mechanical Engineering or nothing🤷‍♂️. So then how did I find myself as a developer today?🤔

Well, it happened in 2016 when I reached form 5 (grade 10), where we started learning about programming. I was not hooked at first try but I would say I did love the idea of programming because it was still part of science and technology after all. We just got a brief taste of C in the opening months of the school year and then BOOM!!💥💥💥 Politics had to ruin everything. Our country entered into a socio-political crisis with 1/5th of the country demanding to break away. Schools stop, teachers went on strike, lawyers went on strike, pretty much everybody went on strike! (Funny now that I think about it!😂😂). A lot of insecurity arose, panic, tension, all that making it challenging to go to school so I had to stay home till it was safe again.

Now, sitting at home, I'm thinking, what do I do with my time? That's when my elder brother told me they had also been learning programming at his school and he was going to be learning at home. He would always say he was the one who got me into programming. I would always deny it of course😂😂. But yeah, he did get me into tech (let that be our little secret🤫). So I started learning from some of the tutorials he downloaded. I think I started with Python. Yeah, back then I was into "Python is easy because the syntax looks like English". I did the basics of Python all through that year not really sure where I was headed. Even when I was able to start school again, I was still fumbling around with Python. No projects, no going beyond the basics, no one to help me, NOTHING! I was pretty much at a dead end.

So How Did I Find My Way?

Weird how I got into tech right? Well not really, I'm pretty sure most of you got into tech as clueless as I was right? After I think about two years of mindless floating around with no progress because I wasn't sure what I was doing with coding, (by this time I had a taste of Python, Javascript, Html, C) I knew I needed to find my way. I had started enjoying code and I really wanted to make something of it. I think that's when I stumbled upon Andrew Sterkowitz Youtube Channel where he gives career advice about how to get into tech as a self-taught developer (Great channel, you definitely want to check out some of his videos). He talked about finding a goal as a programmer and then picking the programming language that will help you reach that goal. Then I realized I had no goal per se - I was just blindly coding for no reason.

I started to reflect on what to do with my coding career. I didn't know what I was doing with Python so I dropped it. Html on the other hand was part of my school work and that's where I met the famous Marquee tag😁. I've mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, this was the tag that kinda got me interested in web development. I'm really not sure why, but seeing text move across the screen was very interesting to me. That's when I started digging deep into web development.

But Then, How did I End Up Being Self Taught?

The short answer to that is I didn't/don't like the school system. It just isn't my style of learning. I had already started learning coding in my spare time and I discovered I loved that way of learning. Learning at my own pace, my own time. But then there was a big problem. How do I get my parents to support me on this🥵? Those coming from an African home know what I'm talking about😂. Like how do you tell your father you don't want to go to school anymore?😂😂. Biggest dilemma of my life.

I still had a whole year to finish high school before breaking the news to them. I wasn't sure where the courage to face my Dad would come from but I knew I had to do it one way or the other. Well, the year school year was coming to an end and all that was left was my final exams and that was it. Remember when I mentioned that political issue my country has? Well, I've just been avoiding mentioning it as much as possible but now it came to hunt me like many other students. Separatist fighters often kidnapped students during the school year asking for ransom from parents to fund the "civil war" and also discourage students from going to school🙁. So now my own turn had unfortunately come, right in the middle of my exams!!!!😖. I spent four days in a dark room far out of town constantly wondering... What happens now? Will I make it out alive? Maybe brutally beaten? maybe without a few fingers? It was all possible😨. What about my exams? Will I be able to continue the exams after this?

When you spend that long in uncertainty🤦‍♂️, it definitely changes your perspective on life. When I finally came out (unharmed for some reason, thank God🙏!), I knew I could not live my life to please anybody, not anymore. I managed to summon the courage to go finish the exams. Once I was done, I fully dived into coding, and when my Dad then mentioned going to the university, I told him plainly and respectfully, I was not going. Of course, my Dad did yell but at that point, I didn't really care what he said. I had to follow my gut and do what I believed in even if the idea was crazy. That's how a started full self-learning from September 2020 to this day.

What Has Self Taught Been Like?

I know especially on Twitter, everyone is like self-taught is the golden way to go. Being a self-taught developer has been absolutely great for me. I've learned so much than I could ever imagine and I feel like, for the first time, I actually enjoy learning without having people push me to do so. It is quite fulfilling for me 😊. But is it all sunshine and rainbows though🤔? Definitely not!

The first thing I quickly realized as a self-taught developer is that barely anyone understood me. Everyone around looked at me as if I was not sure of what I wanted to do with my life, at least that's what I felt for a long time. I stopped talking to most people because I did not want any discouraging opinions for my mental health's sake. It eventually led to me having a very limited number of friends I actually talk to. It's really sad when the people who care about you don't understand you right😞? Sometimes I asked myself if I made the right choice going self-taught? Honestly, I don't know🤷‍♂️. All I know is I made the choice and there were always going to be consequences and I have to face them if I am going to succeed in this.

I also had to struggle with defining my learning road map. With all the new flashy javascript frameworks coming out every day, it's difficult to be committed to one. But from past experience, I knew I had to if I was going to make any progress ( cheating is not allowed even in programming😂). I did cheat a little though because I thought I could learn JavaScript, Python, and Flutter all at once🤯🤯. I quickly realise I was heading towards another dead end😂. I took Jonas Schmedtmann's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript courses amongst many others to get started. I finally decided to stick with JavaScript and learn the MERN (MongoDB, ExpressJs, NodeJs, ReactJs) stack because it was/is a really popular stack.

After that, I jumped straight into tutorial hell🤦‍♂️. Silly me I know!😂 You would think at this point and after everything, I would have things figured out and structured so I don't make any mistakes. Noooo! I was still struggling too. Plus I had no one to guide me. I had to figure out things on my own( which is one of the mistakes I made ). I dabbled with JavaScript for months taking all sorts of tutorials and fortunately building a few projects before finally moving to React. Now you'd think I learned my lesson right?😂😂 I took about 4 React courses before I felt comfortable. I just needed one of them🤦‍♂️. And that's how I managed to get through that time up till about June 2021. My learning is a lot better now though, I take fewer tutorials, build more projects and read documentation( super important! ).

How I Got My First Job

I know this is what most of you are interested in😂. Such a long story just to get here. Well, I hope I didn't bore anyone with some of my personal life🙏. Anyways let's carry on. After a few months of going self-taught, I thought I should start networking and I don't remember where I heard it from but I heard Twitter was a good place to start. But then when I got to Twitter, for a couple of weeks, a lot of people, mostly women were like "stop DMing with Hi, Hello" or looking for chit chat and all that. I thought maybe people on Twitter are not so friendly after all. So I canceled DMing people (but not entirely) especially women to avoid being part of a viral screenshot with people saying how disgusting I am🤷‍♂️.

I decided to do #100DaysOfCode because I saw a lot of people saying good things about it. Started around the start of this year(2021) and it was pretty great. I managed to make a couple of amazing friends in that time( Joanna and Magdalena were like my first Twitter friends, I appreciate them so much!🤗 ). Also, the accountability that comes with the challenge helped me with consistency in my learning. While still in the challenge, I released my portfolio, which led to my first job offer (from Twitter☝). I was super excited about getting an offer, I came totally unprepared for the interview( I do dumb things, I know🤦‍♂️). Yeah, you guessed it, I messed it up big time and obviously did not get the job. Got a second interview, flopped that one too🤣, then I thought maybe I should stop trying to get a job for a while. I focused on sharpening my skills and learning more about interviews, communication, and stuff.

I kept hearing Twitter was the conversation app but then I didn't know how to create that conversation. I already had that mindset, chit-chatting was a bad idea. Then Yuri came on Twitter and those on Tech Twitter know what she was able to achieve in a few months. She had this magic of creating amazing conversations with people and I was so eager to learn how she was doing that. I enjoyed talking to her every time I ran into her tweets. I DMed her and asked her for tips and she told me she was just interested in what people were doing and she was just engaging with their tweets and DMing and just chatting really. So I decided to try it, and I was surprised at how much I had been missing on Twitter. Most people were actually really nice and some were open to just chatting about life and stuff besides coding. I made so many amazing friends( top 2, Mina, funniest ever😂, and Ronnie, Ma Man!👊). I just had fun talking to people and helping newbies.

Why is all this important? Well because the next job I found came for a post a found(for a remote full-stack MERN developer) on Twitter from one of my new friends( Sumudu, thank you so much!!🙏🤗). Because I had been actively engaging on Twitter, I got good advice on how to write a good resume, create a good LinkedIn profile, how to approach and interviews, and all that good stuff (Yeah you guessed right, has Danny Thompson written all over it😁, thank you so much, Danny!!). Now I was fully prepared for this and I was confident about applying. Two days after I submitted my application, they responded and we scheduled an interview for Monday. I did a little React review the day before and also did my research on the company and prepared my questions for the interviewers too.

The interview went really well. It felt like I was just talking to some new people, getting to know them and them getting to know me (professionally, of course, I wasn't asking about their pets and stuff😅). There were technical questions too. I remember they are about "How does the redux flow work?" and "How does the Nodejs handle async tasks if JavaScript is single-threaded?". I answered to the best of my knowledge. I think they also asked about testing to which I said I don't know much about( tip from Twitter😉). Finally, there was a little challenge "Write a program to test for prime numbers" which I managed to figure out after a while and impress them really😂. So after that, they made an offer a few days later, I accepted, signed the contract, and got my first job in tech🥳🥳. It's been amazing so far and I love my new job.

So that's it guys, that's how I "broke" into tech. It's been a crazy journey. I know there are so many things I may have left out and rightly so because I don't want to write a book instead of an article😂. But then if there is anything you want to know more about, you can always find me on Twitter ( timo__tech ). My DM is always open for chats and questions. Also, do check out all these people I mentioned in the article, they are a big blessing to me and definitely will be to you too. There are many more I could mention but let's not get crazy shall we😂?. Well, I hope this article was helpful and inspired some of you on your journey into tech. This is just the beginning for me and I'm looking forward to many more wins and helping more people get into tech without making the same silly mistakes as me😉. Anything is possible and if I can make it, YOU definitely can make it too. Thank you so much for reading!!🙏