3 years ago, I graduated high school or secondary school, as we call it over here in Nigeria and Africa. I had always been interested in writing, be it prose or drama or even poetry. You could say I got my "high" from filling my old notebooks with words and watching my younger siblings gush over the plots.(It was cringe though.😂)

I wrote for months, wrote stories, wrote poems, every bit of creative outlet I could afford, I used it. Sometime, last year, however, I slowly transitioned to technical writing. From short stories, I wrote blog posts. From poetry, I wrote articles. From drama, I wrote on tech, fashion, on lifestyle and on health. I became the guy who wrote what I termed as 'boring' articles as a kid. But isn't that what growth is all about?

However, with time, that again changed. My brother has always been a Full-stack developer, talks about it all the time, gets excited when talking about it. I would even dare say he breathes codes. I would listen to him, trust me, I had no choice, as I was the only one who was remotely interested in programming at the time. Overtime, his talking broke through my feeble defense.

He sent a link to a UI/UX design course he thought I could work with. I was lazy about it at first, but overtime, it too became something much more important to me. The original plan was to complete the course, get the knowledge and graduate as a UX writer. However, I found myself enjoying the course a lot more than I thought I will. I learnt about the fundamentals of UX design, understood that the active voice is important in UX writing, learnt about the positioning of various icons and elements to optimize user conversion among a host of other things.

Programming is the best source of mental fuel I've found, and ever since my brother finally fixed a pesky bug that has been plaguing my design for so long using JavaScript, my inner child has been having a field day. This sparked my interest, and I soon discovered that what I'd been craving was much closer to home than I had realized: lengthy coding discussions with my brother, and application of said discussion in the form of coding.

The Abyss That Is Called Programming

I'm sure you can tell from the title that I'm a great literature nerd/fanboy. By the time I graduated from high school, I had become pretty skilled at Photoshop photo alteration and literary fanart. Additionally, I became familiar with User Experience design (UX) and all its pleasantries. As far as I'm concerned, that's a whole lot of adventuring.

My brother and I were up late discussing future plans for our careers one night in September of last year.

I start, "I've been thinking about a career in technology, but I'm nervous about having to start from scratch. However, in the field of user interface and user experience design, I am already an established professional. I have done enough freelance work and internships to feel confident in my ability to make a good living as a designer. Furthermore, I am concerned that all of my prior experience and education will go to waste if I decide to begin my professional life in the field of computer programming from square one."

His initial line of inquiry was, "Why do you want to get into Tech anyway?"

My truthful response? "Cash!! and Financial Leverage." While an infinite number of people can use code written once, UX design has a finite number of users.

After giving programming a try, I found design and development all share one thing in common:

###INITIATIVE RESEARCH

That's what programming is designed to accomplish. Creating value from a lack of value! And I knew I was competent at it; I knew I could write code and handle the logic and complexity involved.

Now my brother makes a living practicing the skill of transforming tangled lines of code into works of art, something I have always appreciated on the side but never considered pursuing seriously because I always felt it wasn't my calling. I had to reroll my talent tree and understand I could be more than a technical writer. I was introduced to programming, and once I was, I realized how much I enjoy building things and how empowering it is to have complete creative control over my final products.

At that point, there was no going back. I was deeply engrossed in design, and I never once thought of looking back.

What Should Be Your Take?

I knew that as a programmer I would have to deal with a lot of errors, and when I did I had to look them up all over the internet to figure out how to solve them. What I've learnt is that programming is much more than simply making stuff, it's also about fixing bugs. The great thing about those mistakes is that it's really unusual for someone else to not have encountered the same issue. because many individuals have run with such problems and been gracious enough to document their fixes all over the place. All we have to do now is figure out how they fixed those mistakes.

If you're just starting out in the world of programming, my piece of advice would be to not be scared to make a mistake. Experimenting with as many permutations as possible is guaranteed to help you develop better reasoning.

While doing some research into computers, I came across the word "programming language" and discovered that it is used to create software and other fascinating things. Many of us feel like we can't learn the language and give up trying, just like I did when I was eager to learn a programming language in high school but couldn't install the required software for that language because I didn't have an internet connection. Nonetheless, I could never give up my interest in computers. I was already aware that there was a lot I wouldn't be able to grasp back then. Since this strategy wasn't working, I decided to try something new. My education in HTML began.

You read that right; I didn't start with a mainstream programming language like Java, Python, C, or C++. Markup language, or HTML, it was. I got a book on HTML and began figuring out how it affected the line and view via trial and error. And the best part was that I didn't know about IDE at the time, so I just used notepad for all of my coding. Now, I am about leapfrogging into CSS and I couldn't be any more prouder of myself.

What made you want to become a developer?