Recording My Experience As A Google/Udacity Africa Scholar

Hello guys!

I hope your week is looking good? Mine is looking like the story I'm about to tell. Last week in this post, I mentioned something about starting my coding journey and putting it in another post. Well, here it is! Before I go on and on about myself, have you registered for the Concatenate Conference? If you are a developer looking for amazing programming plugs, this is it! I wrote about it here last week as well.

Now to our story:

After 2 years of "thinking about coding", I finally started learning. My very good friend Tope (whom I already told has a permanent spot in my vote of thanks) (@topriddy) sent me a DM, following a frustrated tweet I had sent out about coding being very hard. It is definitely hard, but it's pretty interesting and is something you can learn if you want. Tope encouraged me to go learn HTML and CSS first before learning JavaScript; which was the best advice really, because things started falling in place after this.

For two to three months from December 2017, I changed my routine. After my morning prayers, I would open my laptop to code. I followed a few programmers/developer communities on Twitter and would check out every software development article I found (mostly the ones on Medium, which were packed with rich programming nutrients). I started courses on Udacity, then went back to Codeacademy, then freeCodeCamp, then W3schools. In January 2018, I attended my first developer meetup (organized by Figma) and it was eye opening. I met people that tried their best to steer me in the right direction, considering I was a level zero beginner.

Speaking of Figma, were you at the Hackhaton in collaboration with Github? Let me know in the comments! How did you find it? Should I do a separate post on my experience?

Fast forward to March 2018, an ever awesome newsletter I'm subscribed to (forLoopAfrica) sent in one of their many awesome newsletters, which allowed me to apply for the Google Africa Scholarship. It was sponsored by Google, Udacity and Andela. I applied with little or no knowledge and went on with my learning routine. I even went back to my application a few times before the deadline to indicate I had now learned new basic concepts.

Deadline came and on the day we were to get a response, and it turns out I had been given a scholarship! I couldn't contain my excitement, guys. It felt really good to have that.

We were to finish the 3-month course in 8 weeks and participate in helping each other on Slack. After the course period elapsed, 500 participants were to be chosen from the 15,000 scholars to go on another scholarship for the Nanodegree Course, still on Udacity. Sadly, I didn't make this part.

However, I had a fun time especially at Andela. Every two weeks, we were to be at meetups which were held in different cities all over Nigeria, with volunteers on standby who were always ready to help with our numerous questions. Trust me, when it came to questions, we had tons of them! I'm so glad I was a part of this program, it has really contributed to a greater percentage of my progress so far.

(Photo by Émile Perron on Unsplash)

Being the "almost - maybe - a - tiny bit - before - perfectionist" that I am, I'm still learning the same concepts elsewhere, so that I can have a well polished junior developer portfolio. This scholarship and its experience has been the major highlight of my year so far. 2018 has been feeling like I'm getting up and acting on stuff. Have you ever felt so alive about something before? Of course you have, why not share it with me in the comments?

I'm working hard towards and looking forward to becoming a fierce Front-End Web Developer. I also just found out about one Lynda Chiwetelu lady on Twitter that's just the amount of fierce I need. Working on being her friend (this might take a while considering I don't know how to make friends *wails*).

Stay winning,
See you in my next post!