MY FIRST INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCE AND WHAT NEXT AFTER.

This was with Dev Career and Progate. I came to know about Dev career x Progate on twitter and that was where I got this opportunity. This happened about the time when I had just started my dev career and I needed where to intern so I could take my learning seriously. I was and still working as a customer service agent in a financial institution but I was preparing to divert into tech.

On this Journey, I came to realize that programming, as a woman is another ball game entirely. I needed a platform that will give me the push I required, providing tasks, resources and deadlines I could meet combined with work; Progate gave me all these without putting an unhealthy pressure on me. I was super excited when I found out I was among the 100 chosen for the internship.

First Month

My experience with Progate was very amazing. Something worthy of applause was the fact that the mentors were very generous and provided the interns with data every month. This increased my commitment as we were also given free access to use Progate platform.

The first month was for introductions amongst the 100 selected interns and familiarizing ourselves with the mentors and the workspace. I started my lessons on Progate platform in the first week and I really enjoyed using it as a beginner. I would recommend it to any beginner as well.

I choose web development with NodeJS initially because I wanted to learn a bit of back-end in combination with front-end. I later came to realize that I needed to be good in one first before jumping to the other rather than becoming jack of all trade and master of none. I remember chatting up @Okoye on this issue of changing track on Progate. I said plenty nonsense that day because I was scared he was going to deny me the request of changing track but the way he responded to the situation was so cool. It was then I realized that he is extremely cool and easy to talk to person.

Second Month

The first task was actually a teamwork and we were to advertise ourselves to the different team leads who went through our write-up and selected the best candidate for their team. It was so hilarious because I had never done something like that before, however, I believe the lesson there was to teach us how to put ourselves and work out there so we can be seen by potential employers as it is in other careers. Eventually I got into a team and assigned a task. I was to code a section of a design as well as add responsiveness. I worked with Dammy, James, Yahaya and they were all amazing people to work with. I learnt how to use Trello, which is a project management tool. I also learnt a little of React which I have never used before.

Third Month

The second task was also a teamwork, we were divided into groups and my team had six members. The task was to implement the three designs given to us and we shared this amongst ourselves. It was hard communicating on Slack, so we had to move to WhatsApp for easier communication and we were able to pass information easily. I enjoyed working with my team members; we helped each other whenever we were stuck on the task. I called Mujeeb and Maxwell countless times when I had issues pushing my codes to GitHub. Members of my team were Mujeeb, Enitan, Maxwell, Azeezat, Stella and myself and these are links to the completed task:

1. https://team-12-easybanking-landing-page.netlify.app/

2. https://team-12-manage-landing-page.netlify.app/

3. https://team12-clipboard.netlify.app/

Ohh, least I forget the games were very interesting, we had games once in a while and it was always fun with loads of cruise to be catched. I won in one of the games but missed most of them cause I was offline when it came on and had to read up on what happened with great laughter at the end. Always bemoaning myself why I missed it.

The mentors were helpful especially @okoyecb, he is the most funny and hilarious developer I have ever met. Also @hackSultan with his timely bomb occasionally. We had guests from multi-nationals coming in to share their experiences such as @samson_goddy from Open Source Community Africa (OSCAFRICA) and there were Q and A sessions afterwards, which were very enlightening. I am using this medium to say a very big thank you to everyone that contributed to impacting our lives such as @hackSultan, @okoyecb, @progateEN, @dev_careers, @Samson_Goddy, @odirionyeo, @hoopsomuah and as well as the anons.

What Next?

Learn, learn and continue learning. We once had a guest who gave a talk on Javascript libraries such as Vue, Angular and React and it was then I decided to learn about React, which is my first priority right now. I also intend on undertaking more projects because I have come to the realization that to become a good developer you need to continuously learn skills and utilize them. My vision is to become a badass developer.

In addition, I intend building something for my brother who is a regular businessman. He owns a shop in Lagos Island and is into frames and wallpapers. I want to develop an app that’ll help his business, something that can help him to track customers that are owing, send reminders to them, advertise what the different sizes and their prices.

I intend to take this journey one-step at a time.