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How I Got Into Programming

Oct 20, 2024

It was September 2017 when I got admission into a technical university in Ghana here to study Computer Science. This was great news for me looking at the circumstances I was in then, I had stayed home for three years after completing my senior high school education and gaining admission was rejuvenation to my lost self.

My bosses then were very happy when I broke the news to them that I wanted to further my schooling and I must confess they were very helpful when I got admission. I went to level 100 not knowing much about computers. The only skill I had was using Microsoft Word and the basics of Excel and a little knowledge on Corel Draw. I had knowledge on these tools because I was lucky to attend a one time free training. During my first year first semester in school I got introduced to programming in C++ This time I didn’t take programming very seriously because I just wanted to learn and pass my exams which is what most of my peers did too so nothing compelled me to look further into what I was studying. To be honest I tried my best and my second semester was okay.

My brains shifted(I called it shapeshifting) to take programming seriously when I went for an internship at a second referral hospital in my community. I did that internship because it was mandatory to do an internship after every second semester. During this time I had a wonderful supervisor who was a Nigerian and he introduced me to python programming and real programming not what we were doing at the university. I had heard so much about python but I wasn’t interested. My goal was always to pass my exams. I do remember my first day of the internship he asked “What programming language do you know?” and my response was “c++” and that was because of the intro to programming with c++ I studied in my first year. I owe him a lot of gratitude for an eye opener on the endless possibilities of computer programming.

He gave me ebooks on python programming to read and also introduced me to Django one popular python framework for web development that I never mastered. It was then that I took programming seriously and it propelled me to becoming one of the best students in my class when it comes to programming. Academic work on programming was really easy for me but real life software development which is building projects was a big headache. Though I graduated with flying colours I still couldn’t really develop anything substantial. I was obsessed with programming in October,2021 after my national service.

My obsession led to learning the basics of all the popular programming languages around and I didn’t know I was experiencing hell by learning all these languages if I had just picked one and mastered. For a very long time too I was experiencing tutorial hell but at time of writing this article I’m out of this hell and have built a few websites here and there. I am constantly learning to improve myself, though I get distracted most of the time too. I am working on reducing it. My aim is to build projects that would be used by millions of users and I don’t know if I would ever achieve that but I am working on it. Currently I build web applications with Javascript and I am learning rust.

Dear reader, I’m not a professional writer and It takes me a long time to write these articles without any typo.

Thank you for reading.