Why do I love coding? To be honest that's a tough question because it's just something I always find myself doing unconsciously for hours. It is something that took me 4 years to eventually start, Shoutout to procrastination but yeah I've been coding for about a year plus now and I've quite loved my life since then.
How has the journey been? While I initially thought coding was rocket science you know, it looked difficult at the time. How on earth was I going to learn and master "HTML"? A lot of things tried to discourage me, that's pretty much normal with life. Eventually, I started and I realised that yeah, coding is actually rocket science, I was right. It is difficult, time consuming and literally puts on edge every single time. Anytime I hear someone that has been coding say "I hate coding" my reply is always "tell me about your bug". Without a doubt such statements are instigated by a "baby bug" you've come across while coding. At the end of the day, it is still difficult. There's a whole bunch of languages, frameworks etc that are out there with very large and quite complex documentations and in today's world, you need to know at least 5 of them to stand a good position in anything. So you see, the main difficulty is from the time consumption learning these technologies come with but once you can master that, everything becomes easy. Everything else is literally, like writing a story and giving instructions to your computer. I started off with W3Schools and FreeCodeCamp working on html and css and from there I did a little bit of Bootstrap. My learning then became projects-based and I actually think that's a good way to go. I picked up a blog series with PHP and MySQL by CodewithAwa and that's how I got to learn PHP (I also got to read the official documentation and and useful articles in my free time as well). Also at that point I realised that BackEnd web dev was going to be my thing. FrontEnd is still amazing but you know, not all of us are really on the creative side of things when it comes to designs and yeah, I'm still efficient with FrontEnd web dev but I like to keep it simple. Everything pretty much kicked off from there, I was coding literally everyday and looping through the internet until I stumbled on Laravel(people told me about is as well) and you know that "new technology, who is this?" vibe. I jumped on it. I learnt it through Laracasts, the contents there are amazing and basically since then all my PHP works have been through Laravel. You'll meet people that'll try to discourage you from using frameworks but you know, just use a framework and see how easy it makes the work for you and get to decide for yourself(preferably learn the language natively first). I'll more like stop here for now, I’ll talk more on it in future posts. Just start off with the right language or tutorial and everything else with come with experience.
Going professional? Well until now, I’ve had only one job interview and that was for a Backend web dev position. I didn't get the job but in all honesty, the interview went well. I picked out so many things from the requirements and the questions that were thrown at me and they have contributed a lot to my growth in the last couple months. One issue I face is the fact I studied Civil Engineering in University and not Computer Science(or some other tech related program). So yeah, convincing people that you can design a building also build a website becomes quite difficult. Regardless, I'll keep on pushing and improving myself, the goal is to work in a professional environment one day and hopefully that'll happen soon.
Challenges? My major challenge is "Nigeria". The internet and electricity services are quite terrible. I spend so much monthly on data and I definitely do not get my money’s worth. The electricity is quite seasonal. Good occasionally, decent and you know, very bad occasionally as well. Imagine having an idea that could change the world but hey, you need to wait for power to come back on. Quite frustrating if you ask me but regardless, I need to do what I have to do to progress. Also my networking hasn't been great. You know, two programmers are better than one one except one of them doesn't include comments in their code. So yeah, I'll like to connect with more programmers than will be beneficial to my growth and vice versa. If you’re interested, you can leave a message for me here.
Benefits so far? Coding has changed my perspective of life. You know, I fix a 1 week old bug and I realise that yeah, I can achieve anything I put my mind to. It also gives me this mindset that there's always a solution to everything(not doing "x" can also be a solution to the problems that comes with doing "x"). It's made me feel good with myself, I feel ready to change the world.
My advice or opinions? Do NOT try to put everything in your head, just know where you can go to for certain information and you'll be fine. Don't jump on every new technology that comes out, well except you want to. Most of them will actually slow you down and they don't get to meet up to expectations. Code a lot, read a lot. Try to to have a reason attached to every decision you make and also try not to leave projects abandoned.
Build > Complete > Ship
Remember, if David Okon stopped coding because of the issues he faced when he started he wouldn't be where he is today. I don't know who David Okon is and I'm guessing you don't as well but you get my point. No matter what, do not give up.