Preamble
You’re probably wondering what that means. Let’s start from the beginning.
It all started when I crossed the border to attend the CMS Africa 2018 summit in Kigali, Rwanda and I made a new friend. Shout out to Michelle. And the way these things go we became Facebook friends.
Fast forward a few weeks later and I am scrolling through my timeline and I see a post from Michelle:
Announcing the 2018 Google Africa Scholarships
So I applied. Somehow during that process I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into. 15000 recipients and 500 slots. I would not bet even a coin on those odds.
A few weeks later I was accepted into Phase 1 and then things got real.
Day 1
So I login into the Udacity classroom and it looks just like it always does. I had done a couple of free courses on Udacity so I was pretty familiar with it. Then, I logged into the Andela Learning Community Slack workspace and all hell broke loose. Seriously.
Thousands upon thousands of people sending messages, reacting to posts, asking questions, joining channels and generally making their presence known. It was an avalanche of activity that overwhelmed all hope.
I remember around that time a blog post started circulating on Slack written by a former scholar and scholarship recipient. I thank God for that post because it calmed me down.
Let’s do this
So I rolled up my sleeves and got into it. The lessons were an amazing experience. I stepped into a world I was not aware of. The world of progressive web apps. I met and got to know the service worker and the indexedDB. In short bursts of knowledge seasoned with timely quips and witty remarks from Jake Archibald and the ever diligent Mike Wales we imbibed and applied the principles of offline first.
We then dived into ES6 that makes Javascript much more elegant and much less clunky. We explored the new features added to the language as well as those mystic secrets that graduate one from student to ninja.
Somehow when we were done it all felt too short. Kinda like this blog post.
console.log(“Exiting”);
It’s been a thrilling journey and I am greatly excited about the journey ahead. The Mobile Web Specialist Nanodegree. Here’s my takeaway for anyone who actually wants it. Make sure to have fun. Enjoy learning and even if you don’t make it to the next phase you will surely be one step further from where you started.