The journey to success can sometimes be smooth or straight if you put the work and effort into it. My Journey started when I was taking a gap year, that is when I found myself asking this question what career path can I take? Then I discovered that I was interested in IT, but that’s when I learned that this career field is broad, and I could be a software engineer. But what is that, well a software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. After understanding what software engineering is that is when I did my research on how can I become one. That is where I came across ALX which was a free online course that gave you a certificate at the end of the program.

My journey as an engineer started then when I came across ALX that's where I learned about doing Hard Things, designing small projects, and learning a lot about different types of mindset growth. Coming across a free program, at first it was shocking but I decided to start the program for the first time sadly, I did not make it to the next stage. Well, that discouraged me but I thought to myself ‘Just because you failed once that does not mean it is the end of your journey’, that is why I applied for the second time, and guess what I made it this time.

Well throughout the program this quote inspired me to keep moving.

"We are privileged enough to be alive, to be healthy, to have education & to influence the world, then our role is not to solve small problems, the only way we can justify these privileges is by solving the world's biggest problems, DOING HARD THINGS” by Fred Swaniker the CEO of alx_africa.

His saying made me realize that I can build and create programs that can help consumers and businesses grow through the skills I am learning. Throughout the program, I started by learning about a growth mindset and how important it is as an engineer. I never thought that working with people could be helpful and can make your learning journey easy because you will be learning a lot from them that is why I appreciate the program's peer-to-peer learning.

On the program, I also learned the following programming languages C, Python, JavaScript, React.js, HTML5, CSS, Data Base (Mongo DB), and creating Unittests. At first, I never thought I could be able to know the difference between these languages but with the help from the projects we’ve been doing at ALX, they helped a lot in understanding every one of them. The biggest Projects that I could say are my highlights are creating an Airbnb project and a portfolio project and this might shock you interview projects as well. These tasks, I found them very helpful because in a way they were preparing me for real-world projects.

That is when I found out that ‘Programmers are tools for converting energy drinks into code’. Oh well, that is where I saw how I failed in some months and passed on some. My biggest Failed month was my second month where we were doing mostly C projects. Then my biggest Successful month was the last month when we were finishing the projects. This sounds very funny because it shows me that I started with no knowledge of what coding is to now know how to build a project from the ground. This tells me that if you set your mind on something it is possible to achieve it.

Throughout my journey, I lost and gained a lot at the same time. I lost a lot of time to spend with family and friends but I had an opportunity to make new friends, become a mentor to some people, and review people from all around Africa. I would not mind going through the same journey again because not only did I learn to become an engineer, but I also learned to learn, lead, teach and most of all do hard things. I would like to send a special thanks to all my teammates whom I worked with on some of the projects, my mentors, and most of all the ALX team thank you for teaching me to Do Hard Things for the past 2years. Well hope you learned from my journey.

So I leave you with a question: what are the hard things you are doing as an engineer/person to and up as a Code Wizard?