My Journey as a self-taught front-end developer in Nigeria 👨🏽‍💻🌐🌍

Hello friends 👋🏼 my name is Ebuka Daniel, and am a front-end developer 👨🏽‍💻 based in Nigeria 🌍, my passion for Tech started at a very young age 👶🏼, I was inspired by my friends in secondary school (High school)🏫, we had a J.E.T.S club which means Junior Engineers, Technician, and Scientists club.

They were involved in all kind of STEM projects 🤖, so you had students creating stuff like this:

Not actually my school just a random picture on the internet 😏

This greatly inspired me to go into the STEM, after passing through the stage of selecting careers as a child and changing my mind the next day 😁, while I was much younger 8 y/o me wanted to be a pilot because at that time I had just been in my first flight 🛫(within Nigeria tho 😔) and it was an amazing experience, apart from the issue of Ear barotrauma 👂🏼

🤣🤣🤣🤣

So after the experience, I was kinda amazed at the opportunity 😏 the pilots and the air host/hostess had to travel to any country of their choice 😁, and the pay was 💰💰 then I decided immediately that that would be my career path, but I was later discouraged because of the traumatic stories of airplane crashes I was told.

Then I said, Alright I’m going to become a Mechanical engineer 👨🏼‍🔧🧰like my dad because I wanted to be like him, so that was my decision, and it seemed reasonable, so I chose to pursue that career.

But I started to see the inclination towards ⚡ electrical/electronics engineering 🔌🦼, playing around with LEDs 🚥, switches 🕹, resistors, motors ⚙️, and the rest, I began to take apart our electronics 📺 at home and try to repair 🔧 and refix them all by myself, discovering how to connect switches to the LED and connect them to the battery 🔋.

What I did if my connections didn't work 😑😑

It was really fun and amazing 😊, scavenging around for spoilt electronics from my neighbours and giving them stern warnings 🙅🏻‍♀️ not to throw them away, but then I was still feeling I wasn't very good compared to my friends who were creating some advanced stuff and going all around for exhibitions and winning prizes 🏆.

Nonetheless, I determined that I would study Electrical/Electronics Engineering,

My dad who does some tutoring for Math 🧮 and Physics 🔭 told me about a boy 👦🏼 he was tutoring that this boy would stay all night “playing” with his laptop 💻🖱️ for hours every single day 📅.

So my dad was very curious/worried and asked him what he was doing, so he told my dad he designed websites 🌐, and showed my dad some of the projects he created using HTML and CSS

My Dad was amazed that a young boy in JSS3(7th grade) about 12 years was doing already “coding” 👨‍💻 and was curious how he learnt it and then asked how he could also learn it, He gave my dad some materials 📚 and when my Dad came home and narrated everything to me, I was amazed that a boy younger than I was doing that kind of stuff, and then I got motivated 💪🏼🏃🏻‍♂️ and decided I was going to start building websites 🌐.

Let’s go 💪🏽

Meanwhile, i began to loose interests in electronics ⚡, so I decided to do this coding stuff 👨‍💻, I took the materials 📚 from my dad (this was around late 2019) and I started learning HTML, I was excited, and my new-found passion 🔥 was driving me to learn more 📚, so I was staying up for hours upon hours learning and studying HTML tags, attributes, media, forms, etc. while I was learning, I was building/practicing 🏗️, this was amazing, this was how I felt 🔥:

I felt on 🔥🔥🔥 lol 😂😂😁

So within about 2 months of learning and researching 🤓 I went from someone who didn’t know what software 💽 was, to someone building “websites” with HTML (Yes I know just HTML 😂😂😂), I was already telling my local church that I wanted to build a website for them, I was allowed to do it, I was so happy my first client, I was super pumped 💃🏽and started working on it immediately, and then I made the first draft and showed them 💀💀, and yeah you guessed right, it was hideous 😂😂😂

Not mine, actually 😅😅 but this is bad

But my church members were amazing people, so they politely told me that “yeah it's nice but just keep working on it to make it better, and that was the last I heard of it 😂😂”, I then discovered something called CSS, I was very sad that I had to learn another “language 🤹🏽”, I thought it was just HTML and that was all (poor me this guy hadn’t heard of bootstrap, tailwind CSS, JavaScript, React, Redux, NodeJS, Vue, Angular, Svelte and lots more 🤣🤣🤣, tooling fatigue is no joke).

omo 😂😂

So I started to grudgingly 😡, and with lack of enthusiasm started learning the amazing CSS, in like two weeks or so just brushed through it(I know 🙄🙄 I will revisit it) , and then I was styling 💅 my ugly sites 💩 and just like my passion 🔥 for electronics died down i began to loose interest in coding too, because I had been doing graphics design before, I easily reverted to graphics design and see if I could juggle 🤹🏽‍♀️ the two of them at once, some of my works:

So sorry, medium compressed the GIF too much but hopefully you can still see it

So I abandoned HTML and CSS for some months then by about early 2020 I meet a brother in the church ⛪ very amazing and skilled 🧠 developer and an amazing teacher 👨🏽‍🏫 Mr. Temple, He coached/coaching me through my journey 🌪️ as a developer 👨🏽‍💻 he gave me the book 📕 Eloquent JavaScript, and then I started reading, but I wasn't really serious with it because I was starting to have passion for design 🎨 so my search 🔍 history was:

Poor me 😢😢 dark mode 👌😘💑

so I just focused on being a designer 🧑‍🎨, but I didn't get much work 👷🏽‍♂️ to do, the ones I got were mostly free or just prolly 2k(₦2000 or about $4)💸(yh it flew away quickly 😁) but I was enjoying just designing 🖌️ for the fun of it 🤸🏻, so I just continued 🧗🏽‍♂️ what I was doing and enjoying it then I started getting tired/frustrated 😤 bcos I wasn't getting jobs, and I wasn't being encouraged any more, besides getting good photos 🖼️ and other graphic design materials without paying 💰 for premium 😁😁 was like:

When I got admission 🎓 into the University 🏫, I had to abandon EVERYTHING and focus on school work 🎒, but by that time I had learnt how to build full websites with HTML CSS and that's all (meanwhile I didn't know just yet about JS framework and all, for building web apps) I knew the next thing was to learn JavaScript, but it was like a cryptic language 😖 to me not like HTML and CSS I was accustomed to and then I just totally avoided 🙅🏽‍♂️ it

This is exactly what I did 😁😁

Back to the Story

But while I was in the University 🏫 I was still practicing as I was studying in school this is one of the Websites I created in school:

I created 😎 the vector character 💪🏽

I wanted to add animation functionality to the website I didn’t want to use CSS animation, so I wanted to add GSAP(A JavaScript framework for web animation)

Web animation

Then due to the ASUU strike I came back home and I met with Mr. Temple and told him I had left programming/web dev, and then he advised me to focus on programming and told me about the opportunities/perks of being a programmer and how the tech space is advancing and expanding and helps to empower people 💪🏽 especially young people. So I got really motivated and abandoned every other thing to focus on coding, I picked up Eloquent JavaScript began reading (I didn't understand a thing at first 😑)but I continued 🧗🏼‍♂️

I was able to get the grasp of JavaScript and I started building Vanilla JavaScript websites/basic applications 🌐 I had now heard about frameworks and other stuff that was beyond the scope of what I had previously been accustomed to, and after Vanilla JS, I started leaning React and Git and still have ALOT… to learn 😢.

Front end developer’s Roadmap 😫

Imagine what programmers go through, 😌 and new technologies are still coming out, then newer versions and improvements that you have to keep up with 😔

So yeah this has been pretty long 📜, and I have been writing all day (Literally 😅) so I'm just gonna leave it here 📌.

And Hopefully Someone, anybody at least one person will at least read this Long and probably boring story 😴apart from the people I invited.

P.S I did this after reading the amazing book Show your work(Actually a series “show your work”, “steal like an artist”, and “Keep going”)* by Austin Kleon which changed my life(apparently), I’m an upcoming software developer and I decided to document as I learn, and enjoy the process if you are an experienced developer 👨🏽‍💻, or anyone at all reading 📖 this and I said anything that was wrong, pls feel free to correct me in the comments I really want to learn 🤓, pls give a clap(s) if you really enjoyed it, and if you read to the end pls leave a comment 💬, and follow 🤝 for more….

Thanks… 😊🤗💖

*I may earn a small commission if you purchase the books with my link 😁 but if you choose to buy the books without using my link that's alright, but the books are very awesome 💯

SOAK IN AND ENJOY THE PROCESS 💆🛀