WITW honed my technical skills via challenges
Tags: womenintech, beginners, javascript
Published: 2019-10-06 07:20:59

Since the day my colleagues and I were informed that Andela has agreed to give us the opportunity to work there as interns, I was greatly excited and worried at the same time. When they told us to first go through the challenges on freecodecamp, I had good moments learning codes there, although I had to rush so as to finish the course in a timely manner.

By the time of starting the workshop, I wasn't yet done with the course on freecodecamp. The good thing is that I didn't stop to learn; because during the workshop that is where I learnt most of the new skills than on freecodecamp. I got to understand what is responsive website and why we need it, I learnt about more new tools that help for doing the back-end like nodejs/expressjs, eslint, mocha; all were new to me. In fact, I was a beginner in JavaScript.

In the past few weeks, I have been working on a project that gave me hard time and took me more learning and working hours. If it wasn't of great passion and patience in programming, I wouldn't have managed to continue. I can't forget the first time, I had installed eslint, my file turned out to red lines. Imagine seeing this in your project; very awful. That is the same case on the tests. Good thing, I managed to work on them.

The skills I acquired from this workshop such as project management where I had to split the entire project into manageable piece of work and created the stories. I was also new to github and wasn't aware of how to use good git workflow; but I am able to do that now. Posting daily standup and communicating about my blockers helped more, for many blockers I had were solved and was open to tell my stuck points.

Besides of the improvement in coding, I also made new friends whom we share interests. Those friends are the ones in the cover image. Actually no one can manage to effectively work in Andela without the ability to work in team, that is the reason having soft skills also enabled me to communicate with my fellow, learnt from them, helped them, motivated one another and ensured we all were going in right and forward direction. This also helped me to keep moving despite of the challenges and blockers that I had. 

I believe programming can't seem simple to someone who doesn't like it, or doesn't have eagerness to learn and improve in technical skills. It didn't take me any effort to feel the enthusiasm of knowing how to code, but I had to strive and work hard to keep moving forward and learn more new skills related to programming. In spite of the love for technology and programming; my friends, family and colleagues pushed me to reach my higher level. I don't hesitate to say that my colleagues in Women In Technical Workshop influenced me positively and helped more for me to reach my high potential and excel.

Lastly, I would recommend many more workshops to other young people who have interests in tech, specifically women for there is still a low number of women who join tech particularly in software development. I kindly would like to share my experience with other women who like programming but are still afraid to join the tech field.