Hey, I am Ayomide but my friends call me Dray. I am a software developer with about 5 years working experience. Well, I don’t know why I told you about my years of experience, maybe it's out of habit. Recruiters always ask me how long I have misreably stared at my screen, trying to figure out a problem before it figures me out. I think years of experience doesn’t matter and it is never a true measure of a developer's strength, because it's how much you have done during that space of time that matters. If a person spends 5 years doing what another person does in 2 years, does the 5 year experience matter more than another person's 2 years?
A bit about my journey. In my first year in tech, I started off with building a custom Ecommerce platform for a friend in my university. Yes, a full stack Ecommerce platform without a full grasp of any programming language at all. I shabilly learned Javascript and PHP, just what I needed to get going. For this project, I did the UI/UX, designed the database structure and built the frontend and backend systems. I think I skipped the junior levels and moved directly to being an intermediate developer.
I built this project in 2 weeks by directly implementing what I learned into the project. The project wasn't that great, I'm not going to lie. I never knew that every task I did on the project could be divided into roles done by multiple people. I started on my own without any guide or assistance around. I was a medical student, so I couldn't find any of my colleagues doing coding. My growth was restricted to how much I could learn and figure out myself. Because of this, I made so many mistakes and built applications with very poor architectures.
Coding was tough for me even though I was interested. The major reason for this is because I was alone learning every bit through my own mistakes. Well, things got better when I learnt about a senior medical colleague that also codes. With alot of excitement, I went to the campus where he stayed and asked him for guidance. It was from him that I learned about frameworks like (Vuejs and Laravel). Even though he wasn’t my mentor, those few guidelines he gave me drastically made me improve.
As I continued my journey, I made more friends who were developers. I worked on more projects majorly as a fullstack developer and applied new ideas and tools introduced to me by my friends. My mentality as a developer also changed. Instead of learning how to code, I learned how to build.
This building based learning has helped me learn so many programming languages and frameworks like PHP, Javascript, Python, Java, Typescript, Solidity, Vue, React, Laravel, Docker, Kubernetes. And I am currently learning Rust because I need it to build a Web3 app, that uses Solana Program. I had also worked on many interesting projects and built a startup that failed. I currently work as a full stack engineer at a startup studio in Africa.
I am always learning something and I think I have learned enough that can be shared and used to help new developers improve. I want to help people make less mistakes and improve faster than I did. So, I decided to mentor 4 newbies every 4 months, making 16 newbies in a year.
Below are the activities during the mentorship period:
Accountability session
- Keep account of what you learn to maintain consistency
Build personal projects
Learn how to convert ideas to a full projects
Learn and practice how to structure the execution of a project
Build projects in teams
Learn how to work on a team
Learn to use project management tools to work better with other developers
Code review
Improve your coding style
Learn to write reusable and scalable code
Learn about code optimization
Technological discussions
- Discuss new technologies and innovations
Please fill this form to apply.
Let's get in touch on Twitter @drayfocus and Linkedin Akinola Ayomide
Cheers!