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| Ijeoma Gift Arisah |
A diverse group of individuals tell us how they began their career in programming. Read them here.
Ijeoma Arisah shares her story.
During a visit home from college, a friend shared some e-books on
HTML and CSS. The webpages I was able to design with those outdated
books made me feel like a magician! And, it was an awesome feeling.
Ijeoma Arisah shares her story.
As a child, I watched a lot of sci-fi movies, so I believed
that technology could help mankind, including being the key to care for
my parents in their old age. Since I knew I couldn’t always be there
for them, I decided that technological advancement would ensure their
well-being and the computer would get us there. In my mind, I imagined a
version of Ironman’s JARVIS, an artificial intelligence robot that
could assist and advance human progress.
Through the years, my interest in technology dissipated but
nevertheless I pursued the science track in my studies. I elected this
track because I excelled in the subject but also because I preferred the
sciences over the humanities courses in history and religion. When I
was around 15 years old, my dad bought a desktop. I didn’t have any
formal training but still managed to find my way around using it by
trial and error.
In college, I elected into a computer science program for
the mere fact that it was a popular concentration. Unfortunately, the
courses were not enlightening at all which created a culture where
simply passing became priority over understanding the course material.
Most of my classmates crammed to memorize pre-written codes so that we
could ace the exams. At the end of 4 years, while many graduated with
honors, they still lacked strong comprehension in programming.
A few years out of college, I decided to go into teaching,
but teaching was not what I felt born to do. One day, my good friend
sent me a link to apply for the Andela boot camp, a program that
actually pays you to learn how to code! It was one of the application
questions that reminded me of my forgotten dream: “Why do you want to
program?” The question literally hit me like a wrecking ball and I
recalled how much enjoyment I got from programming. I felt confident
during my interview and had a gut feeling that I would make it into the
program.
And well, I did, and every day since has been an educating,
challenging, and inspiring lesson. Being a programmer has been exciting
so far and Andela’s unique curriculum — with its emphasis on full-stack
development — is an unbeatable training experience. Currently, I am
learning the Rails curriculum. Of course, there are days when I feel
like pulling my hair out and smashing my computer against the wall but
nothing beats the feeling I have when I fix a bug or solve a problem.
Then, it feels like I’m floating.
I am so happy that I finally ended up on this career path
and with time, I believe that having our very own miniature JARVIS
robots won’t be such a farfetched concept.
Arisah Gift Ijeoma (cutishoty)
is a Computer Science graduate from the Michael Okpara University of
Agriculture, Umudike, Abia State. She’s currently a programmer at the Andela Institute and
is proficient in technologies such as MEAN stack (Mongo db, Express js,
Angular js, Node js) and Javascript but majors in Ruby on Rails.
Do you want to share how you got started coding and your experience so far? Go HERE to see how to do it.
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