My DevCareer experience

My DevCareer experience

Being a part of DevCareers cohort 2 is the best thing that happened to me this year and in my tech journey. I decided to apply for devcareer because I had been taking and watching tutorials for a while without exactly practicing what I was learning as I didn't have a working laptop. Prior to DevCareers I had very little knowledge of HTML and CSS and was trying to get a hang of javascript. In this article, I'll try to summarize my experience with DevCareers.

Devcareers is a tech organization aimed at supporting more Africans into the tech world by giving them access to hubs, laptops, internet, and electricity, all for free. The second cohort officially commenced on the 10th of August 2020 amidst the pandemic and we were split into various tracks based on our preferences with each track having great and skilled developers who became our mentors. for the frontend, we had Flamez as our mentor, and oh, what a mentor he was.

Devcareers basically groomed us to become world-class developers by the tasks and trainings we underwent. The first workshop we had was on 'Git and pivotal tracker' with Funmi as our speaker. There we got to learn all about git best practices, git commands, branch naming, using pivotal tracker, and so on. It was particularly exciting to me because I didn't know how to use git then (I know now😋).

Meanwhile, on the frontend track we were learning all about HTML, CSS, Sass, Javascript, and also working on various tasks. Then the bomb dropped, we were to begin learning react.js and I was so not ready to learn react.js- my reason was "I hadn't learned enough of Js". Well, we went ahead to learn it anyway, and I'm glad we did. From learning react.js we slowly entered into the world of gatsby.js.

It might interest you to know that devcareers was not just focused on us learning the HTML and all that, they were also interested in helping us write hence our first technical writing workshop with shedrack, where he let us know the forms of technical writing, the do's and don'ts of technical writing and so much more. it was such a wonderful time. at the end of the workshop, we were asked by our technical writing mentors Precious Gabby and Tobi to take and complete the google technical writing course after which we were all asked to write articles which you can find here.

For our second technical writing workshop we had Bolaji as our speaker and he spoke on the topic "Beyond the editor: Automating your writing process". We learned about the process of writing - choosing a niche, owning a canonical, SEO and analytics, etc - technical writing templates, and so on.

Inasmuch as a lot of learning was going on we had a lot of fun too. we read and reviewed the book 'Born a Crime' by Trevor Noah, we had games, chitchats, giveaways😁, took dope pictures, and all the fun things you can think of. We also took part in the 2020 hacktoberfest and the Unstack Africa conference.

In summary, DevCareers helped me become a better developer and technical writer,. At a point were split into teams and I had to learn to work with my teammates (who I hadn't met before if I might add). I learned good communication and presentation skills and most of all I made friends and established connections through DevCareers.

Shoutout to Okoyecb our honorable PM, Hacksultan, all our mentors and sponsors for making it all possible.