Hello World!

I wish I could say I was a seven-year-old boy who discovered a Personal Computer (PC) lying in the attic or basement and started using it to write Visual Basic or C and by the time I was ten, I was already building games and stuff. Alas, that's not how the story began. It began about nine years later. I was a sixteen-year-old freshman at a university of technology in Nigeria, studying Mechanical Engineering.

I discovered the internet (and how cool and useful it was) at the age of 12 and even though I had been using it (the internet) since then, it never occurred to me to know how the whole thing worked. Not once did I think of how websites were created or how the games I played on my little Nokia phone then were made. Furthermore, I always considered myself a curious person, so it was something of a surprise to realize that at the age of sixteen, four years after discovering the internet, I had never been curious about software and how they were built.

The first time I saw someone coding, I thought it was the strangest thing ever. I was fascinated by the lines of words, numbers, and symbols with different colours, arranged in strange ways on the screen of the laptop. I also thought coding was something only the brightest minds could do, so I didn't think about it that much. Let's leave that for the geniuses, shall we?

I did not think about coding again until about a year later. In my sophomore year at my university, we were to do a programming course where we learned to code in Visual Basic and C++. This changed everything I knew about technology. It wasn't only for geniuses after all. I spent the next few weeks learning about C++ and eventually Python. However, I did not have a laptop then, so I lost the drive to continue learning.

3 years later, I was able to get myself a laptop, so I was ready to become a developer. At this time, I now knew that they were different paths in tech and that web development was just one of them. It was also the one I was mostly interested in getting into.

The journey has not been the smoothest one. At the time of writing this, I am learning JavaScript with The Odin Project. There have been days when I was able to study and practice JavaScript for 8 hours. There have also been days when the thought of booting up my laptop almost makes me sick. I have built projects that were pretty easy to build and projects that made me want to throw my laptop out the window. The experience has been bittersweet.

Despite all of this, one thing I am sure of is that I'm not going to stop coding. I finally found something that I love doing. Something that made me feel like an artist of sorts, (Yes, coding should be classified as a kind of art). There's also the possibility of making money from doing what I love. Coding is amazing and I am looking forward to what I can achieve with it in the future.

This is my first post here on Hashnode and hopefully, it will be the first of many.