It's more likely that you know me from Twitter than any other platform, where I've been actively engaging and sharing content for a while now. But I recently decided to start blogging after some encouragement in tweets from other bloggers. I intend to deepen my knowledge in different areas of web development through it, to improve my technical writing skills and make some fortune from content creation.
How It Started
In the beginning, I was just fascinated at how computers could do a whole lot of calculations and I wanted to know how they work. But I wasn't able to explore much until I got my own personal computer 💻 (PC) when I was a freshman at the university. Then I got to know that it's called programming and that's what's behind it all. 😲 Though, it wasn't my first time coming across the term.
Concepts
Then I wanted to learn to code 😎 and I searched on youtube generically for that and the C language was introduced to me. I was alone on this quest and not aware of other programming languages, let alone the tech community. I remember installing Code::Blocks, my first ever IDE 😎, and then I started writing C.
Most of the things I did in C were algorithmic problems, putting aside the fact that I was just getting familiar with common programming logic and features like:
Getting My Hands Dirty In C
Afterwards, I began solving problems that involved printing patterns of "*". That is, drawing different shapes in asterisks. Triangles, pyramids and the like. It might seem straightforward at first glance, but getting the logic for those wasn't easy as I was new to the space. I watched many tutorials that solved those problems but being able to devise the logic independently was a hard nut to crack. Experienced programmers might probably have a heck of a time with those problems too.🤷♂️
JavaScript and Web Development
As I progressed through the semesters of my studies, I had less and less time to do programming because the workload turned out to be way more than in my first year 😩. So I stopped any serious programming pretty much till my final year (2018) during which I picked up JavaScript.
Later on, I started learning on freeCodeCamp where I covered quite a lot on HTML, CSS and more JavaScript. And I was also invited by a friend to my first tech conference organised by Facebook, who is an iOS developer now 😎. At this point, I realized that there was a huge tech community around me and it felt cool to be around like-minded people. Ever since I became passionate about community and I attended almost all tech events I knew about.
Quitting A Job
After studies in my home country, grads are obligated to participate in a year-long service programme. But I didn't as I had intended to continue my studies in Germany 🇩🇪 and I wanted to commit to it immediately 😐. So this meant that I wouldn't be able to work as a developer, which I desired, till I arrive in Germany 🇩🇪 or even more because I was occupied with language courses. Oddly enough, I was able to find a position with a startup company but we parted ways after a couple of months due to tech stack issues: at the core, they used WordPress and I was looking to do stuff in HTML, CSS and JS; my discontent was irrepressible.
Working On My Portfolio
Due to the coronavirus pandemic 😷, I wouldn't be in Germany till about 2 years later 😭. That was probably the toughest period to live through. I committed that period nonetheless largely to the language courses and self-learning. Also did quite a bit of working on some portfolio projects so that I don't become rusty, which I continued here in Mülheim. I intend to work here and continue to grow as a developer but for now, I'm getting some paperwork done!