Don’t leave writing code for a long time — Oluwaseyi Aimudo
Uzoma Peters
Technology Consultant at KPMG Nigeria | Product Manager | Software developer | Tech Educator
They say tech is a money printing industry well I'd let you judge from the picture above, but regardless, I learned a lot from speaking with amazing people this year, and listening to their experiences gave me the courage to grow more. I decided to interview a friend of mine, she’s currently working as a frontend developer for a firm in the United Kingdom, and I want to share her experience with you.
What got you interested in?tech??
"I find tech really fascinating, especially the software aspect, what got me interested was how fascinating I found it, to write code, the number of problems that have been solved, and the number of problems that can still be solved using tech."
What’s your role in tech, and could you describe your daily job activities?
"I work as a front-end developer. I attend daily stand-ups, work on my tasks to meet my bi-weekly sprint goals, and review my code with my mentor and others. I also give updates during my daily standups."
"I started working at a new company, so currently, I’m acclimatizing myself to the code base."
Why did you go for that role/what influenced you to pick that?role??
"I picked the role because it seemed like a nice and different learning opportunity from the tech roles I had previously worked in. It also seemed like an opportunity that was outside my comfort zone."
What was your learning journey like; how did you grow your skills to meet the demand of that?role?
"My learning journey was pretty interesting. I didn’t come from a computer science background, so I had to learn a lot of things on my own. I don’t like referring to myself as self-taught because I relied on a lot of free resources on the internet."
"YouTube played a very key role in my career, freecodecamp as well."
"Currently, I use the Vue Framework and subscribe to Vue Mastery, which teaches you Vue. There are several levels, beginner, intermediate and advanced. I paid a fee every month for a while until I joined my new company. They provide Vue Mastery subscriptions for employees, so I don’t have to pay anymore ??."
"In tech, you have to continuously learn, even if you have to pay. You have to continuously learn because new technologies are evolving and updated versions of existing technologies coming out every time. You just have to always keep learning."
What are some mistakes/lessons from your?journey?
"A major mistake I made when I started learning was leaving code for a while and coming back to it much later. When I started, it was very overwhelming for me, especially when I started learning JavaScript. There was a time I left JavaScript for a month, and when I eventually got back to it, it felt like I was learning it for the first time. I felt like a dummy ??."
"That was a big mistake, don’t leave writing code for a long time because you will regret it ??. Even if it’s 10 minutes a day, just do something or learn something because the longer you leave coding, the more stupid you feel when you come back ??."
"Another mistake I made was comparing myself to others, especially tech twitter. It was a big thing until I realized that I was on my journey and that comparing myself to others would only do more harm than good. So, I decided to put in as much work as I could, learn as much as I could, and not compare myself to others. It worked out pretty well for me. You can’t find me comparing myself to anybody anymore because everybody has their journey and everyone learns differently so go at your own pace but do the work, learn, grow and do the hard work. You’ll most likely cry because it’s difficult but just do what you can do and don’t compare yourself to others."
Could you advise people currently at the start of their?journey?
"As I said earlier, please don’t compare yourself to anybody because comparing yourself is detrimental to your learning journey. Another thing is to code every day, write code every day, and do as much as you can. When you leave coding for a long time, everything can sort of evaporate ?? and when you eventually get back to it, it’ll feel like you’re learning it for the first time. Then it takes much longer to master it."
"Utilize free resources out there that can help you, YouTube, freecodecamp, and articles that can help. There are a lot of articles out there that you can utilize. These helped me during my journey and are still helping now, so I’d say you should use those platforms to learn."
"When it comes to paid resources, I’d say Udemy, Udemy was very useful to me, and another one was Pluralsight but that’s quite expensive."
"When you’re starting, I’d suggest you go with freecodecamp and YouTube. They’re good *free* resources to use."
"Another thing I’d say is to build a lot of projects and have a portfolio, especially when you’ve gotten to the stage you want to start applying for jobs. As a Frontend developer, it’s easy to build a portfolio compared to backend or cloud engineers, so I’d say just build a portfolio and keep learning."
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"Also, document your progress and your process, I don’t mean you have to go on Twitter and say, “I did this or that today”. You can have a separate book where you document your progress because after a while you can go back and see where you started from so whenever you start to have imposter syndrome you can go back and see where you started from and where you currently are. Imposter syndrome is something you most likely will experience, which is why it’s good to have a portfolio so you can go back and see what you’ve worked on and where you are now."
Any resources (learning and career-related) you’d advise people to?use?
"When I started learning to code, the first website I used was W3schools. I also used YouTube and free code camp. Those were the three major websites I used to learn how to code."
"There are also a lot of communities out there. One I’d suggest is shecodeafrica. I was part of that community for a while."
"Regarding job search, all the jobs I’ve ever gotten are from LinkedIn, apart from a referral I got to a job while in university."
Regarding LinkedIn…
"Right off the bat, your LinkedIn is most likely not optimized for recruiters to reach out to you, so there are some things you have to do for recruiters to see your profile."
"First, you have to activate your “open to work” feature for recruiters, not the image, but rather the option for recruiters alone to see that you’re open to work."
"You have to also go to your settings and make sure that your profile is visible to everyone, and recruiters can see your profile, job history, qualifications, etc. Because typically, recruiters wouldn’t be able to view that information unless you’ve activated that on your LinkedIn settings."
"When you’re using “easy apply” to apply to jobs on LinkedIn, make sure that those settings I mentioned earlier are turned on because it’s your profile recruiters would see and if they aren’t able to see it fully, they’d most likely skip your application and move on to the next applicant, so make sure your profile is visible.
Seyi’s links
Website: https://seyiaimudo.com
GitHub: https://github.com/Oluwaseyi123/
Here’s an appendix of all the sites she mentioned in her learning?journey:
Here’s a detailed process to make you visible to recruiters on LinkedIn:
In my previous article, I wrote about some of the lessons I learned this year while growing in my product management field, you can read that here: First Steps….
Thank you for reading, I hope you learned a thing or two from Seyi’s experience, Have a lovely day.?
Uzi ??
Frontend Engineer | Creating rich user experiences
2 年Thank you! Was a pleasure