How I started Software Engineering

While surfing the internet on a Saturday afternoon, I came across a sponsored post on Instagram. It read “Learn Software engineering in a year for free”. I quickly clicked on the link and read the content of the webpage. It said I could learn software engineering from scratch even without a computer degree. I was skeptical about registering as I didn’t know how true that could be and one of the criteria was to dedicate 70 hours per week. I was like, “even if I were doing a nine to five from Monday to Sunday, it wasn’t up to 70 hours, so why would these people want me to dedicate 70 hours?” So many questions kept popping in my head and even with all the skepticism, I clicked the register button and registered for ALX and I was accepted.

Learning at ALX

I started learning Software Engineering at ALX in February 2022, prior to learning at ALX, I had no idea about software engineering, yet I started, I connected with peers on slack, we formed a WhatsApp group and that was how my journey into software engineering started. I remember the first week I started the program they thought me “grit”. I was wondering if this was a motivational class or a software engineering school. I didn’t know the grit they thought me at the beginning of this program would be my driving force till date. Grit was about growth mindset, having the strength and ability to push, always looking for answers and never giving up even when you feel like it. I didn’t know what ALX was preparing me for was a journey to ups and downs, good and bad days, smiling and crying nights. I can’t and I can do these days. ALX was preparing me for every of this, and I didn’t understand at the beginning.

Keeping the momentum

After the grit task my grit moved from 0 to 100%, I was willing to make this work, I was eager to learn, I made friends, people that guide me through this process. They explain concepts to me and help me make researches. In ALX, we have peer learning days where you get to learn from peers. It helps me understand concepts better. The technical mentors are also there to help whenever you are stuck. We also have live learning sessions where we get to learn a lot.

Lessons learnt from ALX

ALX has taught me to do hard things, when I mean hard things I mean super hard things, especially if you are a newbie to tech. There is a popular meme that says “People who sleep before 12 have really got their life together”. I went from sleeping as early as 11:00 PM to 4:00AM. Sometimes it goes beyond that. Some would ask why? Here’s why, I was learning, trying to meet up with tasks deadlines, reading documentations and of course using stack overflow. You must really have your life together to sleep before 12 while studying at ALX.

At the time of writing this, it’s my 7th month in ALX, with 5 months to go. ALX has taught me a lot. It lays a strong foundation on software engineering, It has opened me to new opportunities, connections and is my first road to becoming a software engineer. I have learnt version control using Git, C programming, system engineering and DevOps, Python, Database management using SQL, HTML and CSS with a lot to learn. ALX isn’t a bed of roses as there are days my grit has moved from 100% to 0.01% and I have had days when I wanted to throw my laptop away and let everything go, especially when the code runs and there are requirement failures. But I pick up the 1 from the 0.01% and take it up again till it rises to 100% as quitting isn’t an option, I will keep on doing hard things and pushing till I have pushed it all to Github. (lol)

Thank you for reading.

This article was published as #week2 article for #4articles4weeks Hashnode Writeathon