A Man’s Greatest Hack
Like the ‘one ring to rule them all’!
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Anthony J. D’Angelo
A little backstory to ease you in…
Like many other kids that grew up in and around Lagos, we’ve had at least a few ‘dream occupation’ to hold on to for as long as we could, until the next best thing strolled in. Parents nudged their children more in the direction of medicine and engineering. I remember wanting to be a mechanical engineer growing up, breaking and fixing electronic devices with the same level of dedication and enthusiasm. Often times though, our expectations are broadly misaligned with the version of reality life dishes out to us; and I was one of the lucky ones — grown up into an adult who wants to program computers; not so far out!
Strength in a bundled broomstick
Learning to code can be daunting because your code doesn’t always run every time you take it for a spin. I learned that the hard way like most people did. What keeps me going though, is that sheer feeling of satisfaction that overwhelms me when I’ve spent hours, or sometimes days debugging an error and finally got it fixed; it takes a lot of courage and commitment to stick around a broken piece of code in the hope that it’ll soon run again. Amongst many other valuable lessons I’ve learned on my journey to becoming a better coder, I’ve learned it’s okay to lean on others for support, to not be afraid to be vulnerable and to be eager to receive help when it’s offered. I’ve had to rely on the love and support of good people; friends and strangers alike in the realization of my smaller goals for self-improvement.
Standing straight is harder than it seems
It’s easy to blame one’s limitations and shortcomings on unfortunate circumstances; on others sometimes, but that doesn’t help much. It’s more profitable not to hold on too tightly to these excuses, and own up to the admittance of our current limitations while building bridges towards our dreams. I had to learn node JS in about 10 days, and it was really hard — trying to build an app’s APIs, learning Continuous Integration (CI) and many more codependent tools concurrently — the most challenging week of my life! I had to depend on tools and resources on the internet, on teammates, and a host of facilitators to push through these wall of limitations: installation bugs, and so on. Keeping an open mind opened up a whole new world of possibilities, and I’m having a lot of fun now.
Keeping growth in a loop — to infinity and beyond!
Keeping my mind in shape and making sure it stays so is my life long ambition. I intend to constantly improve the quality of my relationship with others, as a way of inherently improving my mindset and perspective about, not just coding, but every aspect of my life because getting past the firewalls put up in my own mind will continually be the greatest hack I’ll ever pull off.
