After 5 years of being a web developer, I began a journey to learn everything I can about computer science. First, a bit of background story:
My first introduction to writing computer programs was during my second year at university in 2016, where I was pursuing a degree in Chemistry. I took a course called CSC231 Scientific Programming, which introduced me to the rudiments of computer programming. The course was taught using the languages FORTRAN and MATLAB. However, I was barely interested, as I didn’t have a computer to work with. Consequently, I only did what was necessary to pass the course, which I did with a score in the 81st percentile. After that, I lost interest, believing that FORTRAN and MATLAB would never be useful to me.
My next encounter with programming came a year later when I saw my roommate playing with HTML and making things come to life in the browser. I was so impressed that it piqued my interest immediately. He was attending these classes where he was being taught, and I started going with him during the weekends. I used his laptop at night to practice what I learned and wrote down in my notebook. After a while, I got to CSS. It was tricky, but I was getting the hang of it. I joined the Andela learning community where I continued to learn, albeit painfully slowly.
I took a pause to focus on my exams, after which I returned home. This hiatus took about 4 months before I returned to the university where I had access to a computer again. The starts and stops continued into the next year, where I could finish two programs at Andela learning community. I learned Angular at one of the programs and got really good at it.
After graduating in 2019, I got an internship at an Edutech company and thus began my journey in professional programming. From my background, you would realize I never got introduced to the basics of computer programming. I never even heard of Big O notation until 2020, a year after my first job. I did good jobs as a web developer, but I still felt I was lacking a lot. I could not relate to many technical terms and paradigms. After some deliberations, I enrolled in the TalentQL pipeline bootcamp to learn more and be on my way to becoming a true software engineer. While I learned a good deal at the bootcamp about how to start, architect, and finish projects, market myself, and even got a better job at the end, I did not learn what makes up computer programming—data structures, sorting and searching algorithms, design patterns, etc.
The tipping point came after I had an interview which I botched horribly. It was an interview for a Frontend position with Angular. I was (and I still am) very confident in my ability to use Angular, and that was what I was prepared for. But during the interview, I was asked questions about JavaScript’s event loop and the basics of how dependency injection works. When the interview ended, I knew I stood no chance of getting that job. I was so sad that I spent days learning what the JavaScript event loop is. Of course, it was too late for the job but not for my career.
I just want to be an excellent software engineer. I just want to be able to help build globally recognized software products. I began to find ways to learn about computer science from scratch and I came across this story, the author’s guide, and also this computer science study roadmap.
After further introspection, I made the following decisions:
- I will follow this computer science study roadmap as closely as possible to guide me.
- I want to choose another programming language to begin my journey with, and I have chosen Golang.
- I will document everything I learn by writing about it.
- I will build as many projects as I can with what I learn.
- I will strive to move towards backend programming.
I have learned a great deal in the past few months. I will be updating this post with links to other related posts.