new beginnings, trying old things
Back from the dead, eh?
First, some housekeeping.
The last time I wrote on here was in April. If I remember correctly, it was something about the Snyder Cut of the Justice League. After posting it, I felt that it was a bad take and deleted it a day later. Realistically, I’ve not had a post spend longer than a day here since February, and even that was an essay I had written long before.
Why did I stop writing?
I didn’t. I wrote a fair bit. I wrote on JAMB and why it’s actually quite an awful exam, I wrote on how Nigeria is going down the path that Yugoslavia (Afghanistan is the new country of comparison) went, I wrote a few book reviews, and I even wrote on why I think young people are leaving the church.
The problem is I didn’t think anything I wrote was worth reading. So I either didn’t complete them, or I completed them and left them to rot in Evernote drafts. The one I completed was hastily done and under duress.
Why am I back? More importantly, am I back at all?
I think I’d have procrastinated on writing if it didn’t require that I write something. The thing is, I’m a tech-adjacent person. A tech bro in-waiting, if that sounds better. I used to be a full young coder when I was slightly younger, but I drifted away because of school and apathy. Now I have seen the light, and I want to learn something new, something different from the usual. So I returned to old stomping grounds. I reopened a GitHub account and started trying to learn how to code. Again.
I discovered the Zuri Training early this year, and I got accepted into the cohort. It started nicely, but exams came calling and at some point, I just fell off a cliff. Experiment 1, failed.
I had a rethink and a spell away from everything tech. Not for long, though. I saw something on my Houston Twitter about an Internship, handled by HNG with ties to the Zuri Team. I decided to give it a shot Everything was going well until I discovered that in one of the tasks, there was a requirement to write an article on said internship. So, here I am. Writing, again.
In theory, I have a set path, a specific area of tech that I want to learn. At least that’s what I told them. I chose the Frontend track, which means that I want to work on what the users see when interacting with a website, web app, or mobile app. Fashion, for devs.
In practice, however, I intend to learn as much as I can in as many areas as I can. That will never truly come to pass (see Experiment 1 for more details), but I’m determined to do something right here. Exams are coming, but two virtual semesters have somewhat lowered my expectation of what to get from formal education.
To that end, I’m coming to this one a lot less unprepared than in Experiment 1. I’ve learnt a few things.
By “a few things”, I mean multiple tutorials on frontend subjects as varied as Figma, HTML, Git, and a few other ones I’m too selfish to share.
On the whole, this is quite daunting. I have exams coming up, and even though school has less drawing power than before, I still want to succeed. I want to write more, learn how to code more, pass the Internship tasks, do actual charity work with the UN, and not be weighed down by circumstances and being a Nigerian. I haven’t even listed half of it. Sometimes I worry that I’ve overcommitted myself and I’ll burn myself out like last time. Maybe it’s a fair assessment to make. Maybe coding is not for me and I’m better on the outskirts. But I’ll do it anyway.
So, out with the old, in with the much older, I guess?
