Where it all started
My first interaction with a computer was in my grade 2, 2005. I was 8 at the time, but by then I knew nothing about programming. As a matter of fact I'd never heard the word "programming". My father, after bringing the computer home and setting it up, sat me down in front of the monitor and taught me how to play around with shapes in Microsoft word. He later went on to teach me, and my siblings how to type, how to interact with different features of the program. My father was essentially my first computer teacher. Over the years that followed, I kept practicing, playing around with word, excel, power point and of course, Need For Speed, Pinball...... Ohhh!! the good old days. I didn't start computer literacy studies until I joined high school in 2012, (yes, our schools didn't teach computer literacy until high school, at least according to the national curriculum).
Baby Steps
Infomatrix 2014
My high school always received invitations to international science olympiads. One of the most famous ones was Infomatrix, an international computer project competition held annually in Romania. The competition, at that time was divided into 5 categories :- Hardware Control, Programming, Short Movie, Computer Art and Robotics. As soon as I saw the poster for the competition, my instincts immediately told me to go for the programming category. I had no prior experience in computer programming, I'd tried doing computer art and short movies before, when my dad gave me his IBM ThinkPad laptop after he'd got himself a new one in 2010, but for some reason I instantly felt that programming was the right choice for me. I spoke to my father about the competition and he agreed that I could go. I was so excited. It was then that I was introduced to coding. I was assigned an instructor/tutor, who had a project for me in mind. It was an online learning management system. He started training me and my project partner, in HTML, CSS, a bit of java script and ASP(Active Server Pages). The trip to Romania was a memorable one. The competition exposed me to so much that blew my mind wide open. I met so many young people, who had very brilliant projects. The icing on the cake was the bronze medal that our project was awarded. My passion for technology was invigorated and I never looked back ever since then. I returned to Uganda more passionate about technology, programming in particular. I couldn't wait to start building more projects.
The journey continues
I continued practicing website design even after the olympiad, but that was during my holidays away from school, since I barely got a chance to do so while at school. After my final O'level high school examinations, I decided to enroll for a java level 1 programming course at the Greenbridge school of open technologies in Kampala, Uganda. It was there that I was introduced to functional and concepts and object oriented programming concepts. After my upper high school, I was enrolled into Aptech Education Center. I was introduced to C programming, Modern Website design with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. I was also introduced to database design with SQL.
2020
2020 has probably been my most important year in this journey. It is the year where I decided to get out of my comfort zone, and take on real programming challenges, and get acquainted with a couple of important technologies rather than simply focusing on easy programming problems like I'd been doing before. I managed to learn :-
- Flask, a python framework for web development
- MongoDB, a cross-platform document-oriented database program 3. 3.
- Restful API development with flask.
- ReactJs, an open-source, front end, JavaScript library for building user interfaces or UI components.
- NodeJs, an open-source, cross-platform, back-end, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.
- Docker, a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.
- A little bit of Django
In 2021, my goal is to build onto and improve what I've learnt so far. And learn new skills like machine learning, AngularJS, Kubernetes and React Native.
It has been an interesting yet somewhat slow journey, but I'm grateful for what I've learned so far and I will keep working to become better so that I can help revolutionize the tech industry in my country, Uganda and solve a lot of the problems faced by the world today by leveraging the power of technology