My Journey Through AltSchool Africa: Month 2
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
Jeremiah 29:11(KJV)
Hi 👋, it’s me again! Okonu Deborah, documenting my journey through AltSchool Africa, School of Software Engineering.
Firstly, if you’re yet to read the month 1 version of My Journey Through AltSchool, I will suggest you read it first before you read this. It’s always good to start from the beginning 😉.
Let's go!! 🚀🤸🏼♀️
Remember the favor I told you to do for me?🤔 Yes! The part where I said, you should get a glass of wine, juice, or water. Lol, and sit tight, because it’s going to be a pretty long journey. But, not a boring one and it’ll be totally worth it??!
Yes! I guess you remember now!.
Let’s do this again!😁🤸🏼♀️🚀
Diving Into Month 2 of learning🏊, things are getting more serious😲. But hey! Let’s keep our fingers crossed 🤞.
So, we officially started our First semester this month 🥁 and we focussed on Front-End Engineering. They made it general for everyone.
Ohh, wait!⏸️
I guess I didn’t mention that AltSchool Africa, School of Software Engineering has three tracks. Yes! Front-End Engineering, Back-End Engineering, and Cloud Engineering.
And, I know you might be wondering which one I applied for 😏. I’ll make it known soon 😁🚀▶️
Week 1:
The Journey just started.🙃
We learnt about introduction to the web, and servers. I learnt how the web works, and how the client and server communicate.
I also learnt about some introduction to HTML (Hyper Text markup language), and yeah! I learnt how to create my first Html document 😁🤸🏼♀️.
Yes! It was fun and exciting, it felt like magic too😂.
We had our first town hall meeting this week. 💃🎉🥁 With Tabitha Kayvu (Community manager), Jerry Uke, Rukewe Onuwa, and others.
We had two live sections this week. Though I couldn’t attend the second one😢, Cause I had an emergency. But the one I attended was really good.
Kudus to Mr. Osemitojo, Our tutor for the live class, and Mr. John our Tutor on the LMS.👍😁
Also, we were been shared in different learning circles. The learning circle aims to allow us to easily connect with our coursemates, and learn from each other.
It seemed as if this week was just a welcome to the Month 2 Journey.
Yes! It was so simple to be true. Lol😂
Let’s see what week 2 has for us.🚀🤸🏼♀️
Week 2:
So this week wasn’t so bad.😏
We dived into CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Learnt about the basic things we needed to know about CSS. And also did some practicals on it.
It was fun! Getting to see different colors and ways to style.😊😁
We also had our live section on Wednesday, where our tutor vividly explained all we learnt for the week.
Also, we had our AltSchool Africa Fun Friday section this week!!!! It was💃💃🤸🏼♀️😁. Yeah! That’s right. Fun! And educating too.
We had Mr. Emmanuel Bakare, speak to us on software engineering, and answered most of our questions concerning that. One thing I learnt from it was;
"Pursue consistently rather than Perfection"📌
Okay, So Something interesting also happened this week!😁🤸🏼♀️
Remember the learning circle we were added to last week.🤔 Yes! We were to choose a team lead and co-lead for our different learning circles. And by the grace of God, I was chosen as the lead for my learning circle 💃😁.
I am excited but also nervous 🙃. Well, let’s see how it goes as a team lead🤸🏼♀️.
Week 3:
Haew! It felt like week 2 didn’t want to end😂.
Well, Welcome to week 3🥁. On the LMS (Learning Management System), we learnt about CSS layout; block & inline, CSS grid, and CSS flexbox. I prefer the CSS grid to the CSS flexbox. 🤔. If you’re a developer reading this, which do you prefer to use??🤔😏
We had our two live classes this week too. As always it was really good. I will always commend our tutors.👍🏾👏
Okay, so something interesting happened this week too. It seems interesting things are now happening every week😂.
Anyways, we were given our first assignment for the semester 🤸🏼♀️. Let me give a hint of how the assignment was. For a beginner it was 🥵😓, for someone that already has prior knowledge before applying to AltSchool, it was 😁💃🥰.
I hope you get the logic 😂.
It wasn’t so hard, but it was challenging. We were simply asked using some specific instructions, to create a portfolio website for ourselves and design a static calculator which we would make interactive, probably when we learn JavaScript.
So you see, It sounds interesting and simple. To be submitted by 23rd May. But hopefully, I’ll finish mine before then😁🙃.
Let’s see how next week goes 🤸🏼♀️😁
Ohh, wait⏸️
How can I forget to mention🤦♀️. This week’s Friday was our Community manager, Tabitha Kayvu' Birthday!💃💃😊. We celebrated her during the fun Friday we had this week😊😁.
If you’re reading this, Happy birthday in arrears to you, Tabitha Kayvu 😊 Thanks for being an amazing community manager at AltSchool Africa 🥰▶️
Week 4 here we go!🥁🚀
Week 4:
Wrapping us with CSS, we learnt about CSS media queries and some other tips and tricks on how to create a responsive web page. After going through this week’s course content, I am going to re-do my assignment and Design a better and more responsive portfolio website for me.😁
As usual, we had our live class and it went well. This week’s live class was very interesting and more interactive than other weeks. I guess it’s because of the assignment, lol, we now have experience in what we’ve been learning so we can now all relate better.😁😊
To wrap up this month, we had a software engineer at Cobiro, Wayne Gakuo, speak to us during our fun Friday for the week on his Tech Journey. Something I learnt from this was that;
You learn best when you teach and you teach best when you learn
Something interesting I learnt this week:
The phrase:
Life is short
Has made a lot of persons rush through things and end up loosing everything or actually wasting time.
What am I trying to say?
As a newbie in tech, you might be looking at all these other “tech gurus”, maybe on Twitter that is making it in tech. Earning in dollars and all. And then maybe, you might start forcing yourself to learn just to be like them or to start making your own tech money in less than a year or so.🧐 Now, you overwork yourself, stress yourself, to learn these skills, and sometimes you end up rushing your learning process just because you want to make the money soon. Then all of a sudden you get sick,🤢 you start suffering from depression😞, unnecessary anxiety😪. Because you ain’t getting what you want and the story goes on and on…
But hey!😏 Have you taken your time to do some research on how and when these people started??🤔 On how their tech journey went? How many years it took them to be where they are now??…
If you do, you would realize that you just need to; Take your time, calm down, prioritize, learn, network, and don’t be in a hurry.
You shouldn’t compare yourself to anyone! It’s okay to be inspired by someone but trying to compare yourself to the person, isn’t actually right. The only person you’re allowed to compare yourself with is your former self!.
Don’t allow social media or your peers to put undue pressure on you.
You’ve got this! You can do it!💪🥰 Soon you’ll be telling your own story😁😊❤️
Thanks for going through this second month’s Journey with me😊. Don’t forget to top up your wine😉, we’ve still got more months ahead of us!❤️
See you next month!❤️
