Kindly introduce yourself and what you do.
My name is Queendoline Akpan, from Akwa Ibom State,Nigeria.
I am a Frontend developer and a Technical writer. I am also a Student at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, Enugu State.
What aspect of web development are you into?
Currently, I specialize in Frontend development. Basically, what that means is that, as a front-end developer, I work on creating the visual and interactive parts of a website or application that users interact with. I make sure it looks good and is easy to use for the user.
I work on designing the layout, making sure it’s responsive and works well on different devices, and implementing features that make the experience more engaging and interactive for the user.
How long have you been on this path and what major projects have you done?
I celebrated one year of being a front-end developer this month of January 2023, so it’s been a year now.
Throughout this period, I’ve built quite a number of personal projects and also collaborated on a few projects as well.
I am currently contributing to an open-source project that I’m sure would be of great use to people who want to become developers.
It is basically an application that helps you keep track of your “100Days of Code” on Twitter.
This is a challenge that most newbies like to do just to keep themselves accountable and it also promotes learning in public.
So yeah, I think it is a project that is going to have a very positive impact on developers.
What are the challenges you have faced as a developer and how were you able to overcome them?
As a developer, I am learning every single day, there is always something new to learn or something old that I have to remind myself about, so it is more like my devices always have to be active the entire day.
But living in a country like Nigeria, where electricity is not so steady can be very frustrating, because you could literally be working on something and electricity goes off for weeks and it would get very frustrating because then I have to outsource sometimes, leaving the comfort of my home to somewhere else where I can work comfortably without the fear of getting cut off by the light.
My greatest challenge at the moment is the fact that I am still a student, it is quite difficult being a full-time student and trying to get a proper career as a developer.
At the stage which I am in now, school is really demanding a lot from me, my tech career is also very important to me, so trying to balance both is such a mental workout.
At this point I can’t say I have overcome this particular challenge yet, I would rather say that I am trying my best and prioritizing what needs to be prioritized at certain points.
I have noticed that working on my time management has really helped me so far because I am able to create some time to focus on my school work and also create time to become the developer I want to be. I am not perfect, but I think I am doing my best.
What will you do better, if you are to start all over again?
Mmmm.
If I could start all over again……. I would definitely read more, and by that, I mean read and study documentation properly.
At the beginning of my journey, I barely read anything, I was all about action, and I just wanted to code and practice and build stuff, I mean yeah that is good, but then understanding the concept behind how and why things work the way they work was a game changer for me.
So, It was after like five months that I started reading the documentation properly, and I started reading more code-related books on the language I was learning
.
I realized that documentation had so much more depth than youtube videos and tutorials on Udemy. I was able to understand concepts and fundamentals better.
So I wasn’t just coding blindly, I understood to some extent why and how things worked the way they worked.
Any tip or hack for junior and aspiring web developers
As a junior developer myself, I think I have a few tips and tricks up my sleeves for any aspiring web developer.
First of all, the person should be ready to learn, the person should be willing to learn new things, because technology is evolving, so coming into the tech industry just means you have to be willing to be a lifelong learner.
Being a web developer means that you should be willing to put in the work, learning to code requires that you do it as consistently as possible because that is the only way you will learn, and whatever you learn gets to stick and they become second nature to the person.
And one thing that really helped me as well to become a better developer was solving problems.
I am a frontend developer, so I code in Javascript, when I started I was so bad at breaking down problems and solving them, it made building projects so hard for me because I couldn’t think of the logic to build what I wanted, but then I began solving a lot of javascript problems, and I promise you that it made so much of a difference, I began to go about solving problems in a better approach.
Practice, read books and documentation, build projects, rinse and repeat.
Also, networking is really important as well, get familiar with tech communities and people also in the same field as you, I promise that it would save you so much headache because the problems you might be facing someone else have probably faced it sometime in the past.
Please don’t be shy about networking and talking to new people or people higher up in the industry, do it shamelessly, the worst that could happen is that you do not get any response, but you will still be fine at the end of the day,I promise.
Post your work, post your learnings, not in any way saying everyone should do this but it helped me and it is still helping me, we live in a world of social media, and people find opportunities on the internet just by showing the world what they can build and create, so what is the point of hiding the things you can do, plus it also helps in keeping you accountable to your learnings and development.
What does a typical day in my life as a web developer and a student in her finals look like?
I usually write out everything I need to do for the day before leaving for school.
Currently, I have classes every day from 8 am – 4 pm.
I come back home, feeling extremely tired from all the back-to-back classes, so I freshen up, take a nap, and set my alarm to like 9 pm. By the time I wake up, I feel refreshed and ready to get to work. The rest of my night is usually based on my to-do list, where I get to check out any tech-related tasks and school-related tasks I have for the day.
Every day is not always the same, some days I get back from school early if I am lucky, and some days it’s different.
So yeah, this is how most of my days look like, at this point in my life.
It’s not fun at all, it’s mentally draining most days, but I am so passionate about my career in Tech, so I will make it work either ways.
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