Four things the SCA Mentorship Program taught me -1
On the first of January 2020 She Code Africa kicked off a three month long mentorship program targeted at pairing experienced developers in a particular field, (ranging from design, frontend development, backend development to DevOps) with developers with little to no experience, who are willing to dedicate the time to improve their skills. After an exciting application and selection process i was selected to join the Backend track to learn NodeJS and Express.
Learning a new skill can be intimidating, add that to those annoying bugs that are just waiting for an excuse to make you feel like you have no idea what you are doing, well you know the rest.
Backend Development with NodeJs on Express as a framework is not an entirely new concept to me, in November 2019 I completed a CRUD API on NodeJs after taking a course on it on OpenClassrooms. I remember being stuck for hours on what I can now call little issues mainly because I skipped some basics. This takes us to the first thing the program thought me:
1. Never skip the basics
Within the first week of the program I and two other amazing ladies (Blessing Emmanuel and Sandy)were paired with the talented Oluwatomisin Lalude as my mentor for the duration of the program. Each Mentor was required to design a curriculum which we refer to as a Learning Path to guide us through the program. According to my Mentor’s Leaning Path the Month of January was dedicated to learning the Fundamentals of NodeJs — NodeJs as a Javascript engine.
As i mentioned earlier, I knew what Nodejs could do, I had built an entire app on it. However two weeks into the program, I realized that I didn’t fully understand the why of NodeJs. Why declaring a particular parameter in two files kept me up for two nights and kept my project on hold. Why I kept getting an undefined response when I had Cleary defined and initialized the parameter with a value.
Basically, I didn’t fully understand how Nodejs thinks and hence wasted time dealing with bugs I had no business having. Once I learnt that NodeJs is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. I learnt the structure of Nodejs and how it communicates pre and post compilations. I learnt about its built in engines that makes it function the way it does and it felt like i had a clearer vision of NodeJs.
Learning a new skill does not have to be intimidating as long as you are willing to take out the time to start from the beginning and learn the basics. The basics are also very important because — every complex concept is a build up of several ‘simple’ basic concepts, hence it can be understood by consistent practice of those concepts.
2. Consistency
Every great achievement is a build up of seemingly smaller efforts over a period of time. The best part of my Mentor’s Learning path was the fact that each month after learning a specific concept we are expected to complete a task based on that feature. This helped me practice what I was learning regularly.
This regular practice made me believe that i actually understood what i was learning (Mayowa 1 — Imposter Syndrome 0). Riding on this new found confidence, during the second month I decided to challenge my self and help a friend work on the backend of a task management app. The app required a CRUD api with features such as Creating a Task, Editing a Task, viewing all Tasks and Deleting a task so basically a CRUD app.
Leveraging on all I had learnt so far during the program and my consistent practice I was able to complete the app in a few days with little help from stack overflow and lesser errors when compared to my first app.
3. Collaboration
In the first week of March 2020, Our Mentor Tomisin assigned a task to the three of use to build a Shopping app.
As a team we took out time to first understand the project, then used Pivotal Tracker as a project management tool to manage the project. Assigning tasks and deadline to each task. Even when mid way into the project we had some conflicting ideas of what was expected we managed to merge our thoughts because we started on a solid foundation of communicating with each other. Git and Github was used to manage the code repository and versioning.
Collaborating on this project gave me the opportunity to learn from my team mates. I studied their code and for the first time in a long time I actually understood it. Collaboration helped me to write cleaner, maintainable code with proper commenting observed.
4. Mentorship is a great catalyst for career growth
Having access to a Mentor kept me accountable, that accountability in turn drove me to be consistent in my practice. This helped me to not only understand all I had been learning better but also to use my skills efficiently.
In three months I built three projects with NodeJs on Express as a framework. The program might drawing to an end but learning is far from over for me. I intend to maintain my relationship with my mentor as i see that it would really help me grow. I intend to challenge myself to achieve more and refine my skills daily on the way to being one of the best.
I am grateful to She Code Africa for the opportunity to be a part of this program and for the program as a whole.
