How I got into tech
We can dub this my 2020 pandemic story. Luckily, I have the exact date and pretty much the exact hour I made that decision and I’ll build up and lead you to it.
It’s January 2020 and I’m excited about my first decade entry as an adult. Every other decade from now would just mean weaker knees(and possibly now, bigger bonuses, though I didn’t have this much optimism at the time. ) Up to this point, I have done 4 years in my undergrad and this is my last semester. It feels long overdue and I’m really about to ace those exams and graduate within the year. My life will finally begin. Oddly enough, I didn’t have any resolutions and that must have been so telling. I literally just stumbled into the year.
2 weeks to end of semester exams, this is March, and the government announced that all schools should be closed. We (gladly) went home, if you’ve attended a public university, you are probably used to such interruption. In fact, from my first year to the last, I’ve never attended any academic year uninterrupted, and those breaks can lasts up to 3 months, leaving you in a limbo.
COVID = Solitude. I was always indoors, with so much domestic time and nothing to do. I regularly checked the school portal but nothing meaningful had been uploaded, just notes we already had or outdated ones uploaded 3 years ago by a lecturer I’d never heard of. It’s at this point that I knew I had to be self reliant. I stopped checking and started planning.
First, I decided to constantly think about my career as a individual with a commerce in actuarial science background. I had applied for internships throughout my last 3 semesters and hadn’t landed any. The only emails I got back were for me to confirm my consent that they store my data and even so, uncountable months later. The worst bit of this situation is I had no confidence in my abilities. I decided to check online for courses matching my background so I could build up my skills. I detached along the way.
By June, my motivation was non-existent and I resorted to just chilling. Here’s the thing, you can’t escape yourself. I strongly felt like I’ll be stuck in a rut once I graduated, I could foresee it and I didn’t know what to do. I was heavily stressed about that.
I kept thinking, “my future depends on what I’m doing now, and I’m currently doing nothing”, and I knew what that meant. I really had to find a way to ensure that my life would still progress no matter how long this lasted. “I am young and if I’m so smart then I should figure this out”, is exactly how I nudged myself every minute of the day.
At the time, I was chatting with a few friends and ironically, a good number of them were in tech. (I’m so excited to say this now that I’d actually mention their names, they don’t even know each other.) One in particular had been jobless just recently and landed a job not so long after,(and was chatting with the project manager for Uber eats! It felt unreal.) That caught my attention. He was a full-stack developer. I didn’t know what that meant. It later then hit me that all my friends my age and younger , who were in tech actually had jobs regardless of whether they were still in uni’ or not and the pandemic didn’t really affect them because they had been working from home anyway, most of them remotely for foreign companies. Another thing is they all did different things. From UX/UI design, to game development, to data analysis, to graphic design. I still had no clue what these titles meant. I really didn’t understand how different tech as an industry is. All this felt like privileged information. I had just discovered an industry that one, accepts young people smoothly, what really matters is what you can do. Two, it suits my personality (I’m really passionate in general) and three, has so many opportunities to learn and grow with cool people. It was an epiphany. I felt my troubled mind get intrigued. I had found my place but I hadn’t realized yet.
So July arrives and I am thinking about tech everyday and wondering if there’s space for one more developer. My worries were more external , I knew I could learn anything, I just didn’t know anything about tech. Wednesday, July 7th 2020, it had been a sleepless night of many so I woke up at 4am with a very strong will. To do something. Anything. To stop waiting. I had done enough thinking, worrying and planning. I decided to write my first blog ever. I was done by 5:30am. It was Saba Saba day here in Kenya and I had wanted to go join the people in the march but I was too stressed to participate. At 6am I called my best friend, who was in Mombasa at the time and told her I’m stressed to my core and I have no hope for my future, despite everything I’ve done for it so far. She listened and comforted me through my heavy cries. Immediately after that call I had loads of coffee and decided to pursue a career in tech. What exactly, I didn’t know. I called her back and told her “I’m now in tech.” I immediately went to Google and searched “getting into tech”. Best search ever. I read so many encouraging articles, did tests that would guide me to a fitting role. I did that search everyday first thing I woke up. Went on Instagram and searched #tech #developer #any-new-tech-jargon and saved relevant posts. I immersed myself fully. My heartbeat was ever fast. I was living.
I told one of my tech friends(Andrew) and they offered to teach me HTML, but first we download VSCode. Uhm… so cool. They taught me html and eventually told me about W3 schools and free code camp. That was all I needed. I resorted to learning on my own. Every 7am got me at my desk going through the topics in free code camp and writing my first lines of code. First lines became several and I finished and got my certificate several weeks later. My best friend printed it out. It’s in my file lol. It didn’t have to be, it just showed my progress. I knew HTML and CSS and the whole concept of responsive web design.
My other friend(Joe) told me to start learning how to use GitHub. I created an account immediately. I learnt about Devops from a tweet and added it to my tech jargon. I was growing.
I managed to get a customer service job at Safaricom beginning of August. That was a great thing for so many reasons, but for the most part, it introduced me to the corporate world. Inspiration can be invoked even in the smallest roles so long as you are in the right environment. Safaricom had developed its own QMS software and on the day of installation in our retail shop, in December, one of the developers was present. He was young and had been hand-picked to be part of a small team for this project. He was a Business Intelligence developer. Yet another new title I had no idea about. I, of course got a chance to talk to him and he told me about his tech journey from Uni. I was really encouraged. At the time I was applying for the ALX software engineering program ( how I got that opportunity is in this blog) and I was awaiting acceptance. I knew I had to begin my tech journey in Jan 2021 and this was the perfect opportunity. I hadn’t gotten my confirmation yet and was really crossing fingers to get accepted. I couldn’t imagine otherwise. I didn’t want a plan B. I got accepted!
It’s March 20th 2021 and I’ve been writing c programs. I’ve written scripts and I’ve learnt other programming concepts, it’s only been 8 weeks in this program. I even dropped the beginner title. I call myself a programmer now.
I’m able to understand error messages (from compilers and linters and GitHub), get unstuck and help a cohort member through a concept I’ve already done. It’s really progressive. You know what’s funny? The earliest I can graduate for my undergrad is December, given the circumstances at school so I’d be home for nearly 2 years, March through December 2020 and through 2021.To imagine my advancement in tech by then is motivation enough.
I’m actually really glad I got into tech when I did because I don’t know what exactly I was waiting for. I think we waste a lot of time waiting for a perfect moment but time is the same day in, day out, you might as well pick the earliest as possible to chase your dreams.
