My Developer Journey: The Beginning

My Developer Journey: The Beginning

The essence of this blog is to document my progress, highlight my experiences: growth, challenges and also showcase some of the projects I will be working on. Hopefully, it will help someone out there going through something similar.

Four months ago, I had started a Diploma in Software Engineering at AltSchoolAfrica. During the first semester, we learnt the basics of Software Engineering, How the computer works, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, we equally submitted few assignments. Everything was moving smoothly and finally we took our first semester exams and I made 92%. This wasn’t my first time to coding as I had just completed a degree in CS the previous year, prior to this, I also learnt a bit of Python.

After the exams, we were asked to choose one out of three projects to work on in our group/circle as a holiday challenge. My group chose to build the Phonie Web app: An app that detects the network carrier of a mobile phone number. My partner and I decided to come up with our different implementations of the app. You can check out our final submission here.

IMPOSTOR SYNDROME: Wikipedia defined Impostor syndrome, also known as impostor phenomenon or impostorism, as a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

When we exchanged codes, I was shocked. Yes, our codes solved the problem at hand, but I began to question myself, why is his code so clean? How come I didn’t remember the concepts he used? And so on. On the flip, was I able to solve the holiday challenge? Yes. But because my code wasn’t as clean as that of my colleague and I didn’t implement it with the concepts he used, I began to doubt myself. On a second thought, I have learnt a lot over the first semester which I can attest to, because I didn’t implement my code same way as my colleague or better than him doesn’t mean am a failure.

Learning is a process and it takes time. It is a marathon not a sprint. As a newbie, do not compare yourself with others as you only see their results and not their hard work. Comparing yourself with others will crush you. Just keep going at your own pace [not slow though].

I hope you enjoyed reading this. Thank you for reading.