I was almost tempted to send my friend the links to my first two months at Tiidelab so he could see what had been taking my time. So, if you haven’t been caught up with me, here:

Tiidelab 1.0 experience

Tiidelab 2.0 experience

Now, you’re all caught up, follow me…

JAVASCRIPT CONT’D

Our JavaScript instructor, Mr. Kenny continued to be a blessing to us as he made sure we learn as much as we can during his class. We used the preliminary knowledge of what he taught us to simulate and build an ATM prototype and on more learning, we found ourselves using the advanced knowledge to make our personal project more interactive. We added synchronicity to our pages and watched them delay for the allotted time but load up other functionalities.

Personal project? Yes please. Remember how our Tiidelab coord, the person of Mr. Shamsudeen Aderoju under the guidance of the Council of elders assigned a project to every team? We got Thrive, a mental healthcare application. Mr. Kenny’s teachings helped us to get JavaScript into our work and it made our presentations more interesting. During our sprint presentation, we were heartily congratulated by the Council of elders for job well done and of course, asked to continue to put in more effort.

I was tasked to continue the Therapy feature of our Thrive app using the figma pages as a guide. These things aren’t easy but we aren’t here at Tiidelab to do easy things. Please, feel free to go through the pages of our work and leave feedback for us.

We are working our way to the completion of our app and can’t wait for it to be successfully deployed!

When we had our end of module presentation and came second (per usual for the best team in Tiidelab cohort 5), we were paired with Euvola, another great team and we had a swell time with representatives from each team speaking about all the concepts we had learned in JavaScript till date of the presentation.

AJAX:

Worthy of note was our introduction to Asynchronous JavaScript. This is a feature of a programming language that enables it to carry out multiple operations while within the same webpage. Imagine loading a webpage and the graphics load up first before the logic part of the page. This is because AJAX has been used to make sure the page loads without waiting for those functionalities that may take time. In this concept, we have two ways of doing this, Callback functions and Promises.

PROMISES:

A JavaScript Promise is an asynchronous action that may complete at some point and produce a value. It is able to notify anyone who is interested when its value is available. It is usually in three states of pending, fulfilled and rejected.A Promise is also ‘initialised’ with a …then() method.

I t was with utmost pleasure that I presented Promises before my peers at our regular evening presentation.

I n the course of our regular Friday meetups, we had some very interesting and gripping professional development classes, thanks to our vibrant project coord. This is Tiidelab continuing to teach us that coding and tech may take us to the zenith, but we will need adequate life skills to remain there and remain relevant.

There was also the return of advanced Data Structure and Algorithm and this time, we delved into the concept and use of trees for optimal searching and sorting. This was considered in relation to other data structures and frankly speaking, the usage of tree transformations have always blown my mind! The method of flipping a binary search tree on its side never ceases to amaze me. A wonder indeed!

There comes a time in your learning journey that you just need a form of validation to make sure you are on the right path and not just that but the tools needed to advance in that path. You need to hear from guests, from external mentors and people who have passed through the path you are currently on and can steer you correctly without hitch. You just need that voice of encouragement to let you know that the overwhelming pressure on you is nothing before your capabilities. This came in the form of our guest leader series and project management class.

Personally, Mr. Godswill is a godsent that has made my stay at Tiidelab really memorable. He is succint in his lecture delivery and quite accommodating even when fellows have made a mistake and need to retrace their steps. He spoke to us of different project management tools and it was good for us to re-learn certain things.

Our guest leaders buttressed some already established facts to us to remind us that in our journey to self reliance, we must set goals and chase those goals. Good tings come to people who make good use of their time.

There was also the small matter of Model United Nations General Assembly (MUNGA) where I served as the Russian Ambassador and had a swell time dissing the president of the MUNGA, Aisha Shomope and Damilola Oyedumade.

From all these, I am sure you can agree with John that yes, I have been scarce on Whatsapp but it has been worth it to watch me grow in my chosen career path.

Meet me on LinkedIn and Github!

The journey to self reliance continues and we are undaunted!

I laughed. Was stressful the word I had used? I couldn’t even recall. Maybe I should have said eye-opening. I should have said satisfying. I should have said exciting. Perhaps a glimpse at my first month at TIIDELab will explain a lot better.

Follow me…

We continue our journey with:

JAVASCRIPT:

After the in-depth teachings on HTML and Tailwind CSS culminating in the building of a website portfolio (I never imagined such a thing could be done in such a short time),

W e entered the programming world with JavaScript where we encountered Mr. Luqman Kehinde who always takes his time to patiently explain the lines of code to us to ensure that we grasp as much of it as we can. His classes are usually the highlight of my day because it is from what he teaches us that we get content to create our slides for peer presentations. JavaScript may appear daunting initially, but it becomes fascinating when you realize its power. We started with the very basics of understanding variables, data types, and functions. I moved quickly from ‘Hello World’ to building an ATM prototype and simulating a USSD Code program. Exhilarating!

VIP: Peer review holds everyday and fellows from each team are chosen to represent their respective teams and present what they learnt during the course of the day.

On to:

UI and UX

While mastering JavaScript, we also delved into the realm of UI/UX design. After all, what’s a powerful script without an equally captivating user interface? My journey into design began with understanding user behavior and the importance of intuitive interfaces.

I learned that effective design is not just about aesthetics but also about functionality. Wireframing and prototyping became my tools for crafting user-centric layouts. These phases challenged me to think from the user’s perspective and consider every click, tap, and swipe. There were nights when I actually dreamt about providing design solutions and to the glory of God, I would awake the following day and implement those designs and things would work out extensively!

Team Tech Tribe (Team 3) was given a project to build a mental health care app and the portion of designing and prototyping the Resources page (comprising of articles, videos, audios, jokes and riddles) was given to me. Sleep? Eat? Go to the bathroom? What are those? Knowing that we had to do sprint presentation on every step of progress really put the ‘sprint’ in my steps and got me working furiously both day and night.

There was the unveiling of mentors that happened. Our mentors openly shared their paths to success and encouraged us to do the same. I consider myself graced to be under the mentorship of Mr. Ige Adetokumbo, a senior DevOps Engineer based in Netherland.

Then the meet up:

I won’t forget to mention the part about my first physical meetup in Lagos where I was but a hair’s breadth away from being named HoH! It was glorious! I met other fellows for the first time. We were divided into two and all tasked with coming up with designs for a phone prototype. Everyone put in their best effort and the best team won- alas, it was not mine.

VIP: A team member of mine, Jigah Favour later on became the HoH and it was a fulfilling moment for all of us at Tech Tribe.

As I reflect on my coding journey into JavaScript and UI/UX design, I can’t help but feel immense satisfaction. It’s a journey far from over, but the milestones achieved so far have been incredibly rewarding. The thrill of coding, the joy of designing, and the sense of accomplishment after completing a project are experiences like no other.

The journey to self-reliance continues and we are undaunted!

One very funny thing was that at no point did I feel like it was a position I deserved. Fine, I could use HTML and CSS to do the assessment sent to me, I could make a video, upload to YouTube and send the link to them, I could make myself available for classes and meetings but was I really a good candidate for such a scholarship opportunity?

Fast forward to Monday, the 19th of June when I received this email;

There was a moment of satisfaction where I felt intense and genuine joy and of course, relief, followed by me running to post the goodnews to my family and friends of this;

It has been a month so far and let me quickly say THERE HAS BEEN NO DULL MOMENT!

Follow me…

Seven thousand, eight hundred and ninety people had applied and seventy-five of us had been selected to partake in the fellowship so we all opened with high spirits and great expectations. So far, our slogan has been to do hard things and we are keeping up with the challenge of it.

Meet:

Kadir Salami, founder and head of TIIDELab Initiative. The man who made all of it possible, a leader per excellence with an astounding propensity for seeing TIIDELab fellows become all they can be with mentoring, life lessons and practical applications of these lessons. His words of wisdom and encouragement ushered the seventy five of us into the fellowship on the day of our induction and officially whet our appetite for all TIIDELab has to offer us.

WEEK ONE: We started off with ‘bumpy smooth rides’ in a bid to familiarise ourselves with 9am to 5pm learning time frames. We were introduced immediately to git and github, setting up our accounts and using the environment for sharing codes and collaboration. The Friday of that week was very memorable as we got to choose Heads of House; a title bestowed on two people who emerge very successful on a particular challenge specified by the program coordinator, Mr. Aderoju Shamsudeen. David Ezekiel and Grace Adie won the first ever HoH.

Something worth noting and mentioning is how TIIDELab also sees to our virtual needs by providing us with 40Gig worth of data to augment our online needs, to also ensure no one has any reason to be absent from standups or have not done their assignments.

WEEK TWO: immediately, we jumped into lectures and coaching sessions from two outstanding coaches. Mr. Idakwoji Theophilus and Mr. Adekunle Adeyemi. Worthy of note was the beginning of Big O notation for calculating time and space complexity of codes, a concept most of us had ignored as budding developers but very important in the scheme of our learning.

At this point, we were shared into teams and I was added to team 3 of Tech Tribe. From then on, we began to prepare google slides and canva slides for presentation after each class to showcase our learning and share knowledge with members of other teams in what we call peer learning review.

The first physical meetup commenced the second week and fellows from Abuja met with the program coordinator while others from other states joined virtually to make the meeting a huge success. The second HoHs were chosen after the assessments posed and one of them- Aisha Shomope- is a member of my team and a super amazing person.

Week three continued with our classes on Data Structures and Algorithms. Data Structures are simply a way to organise data into typed that are easily usable by individuals. We have several ways of grouping data and some ways are arrays, stacks, queues, trees, graphs and hash tables. and we also continued with presentations from various groups, some doing better than others at every point in time.

Worthy of note was Friday July 14th and we celebrated the United Nations World Youth Skills Day, 2023. To that effect, we had an interactive session with three various guest speakers from Nigeria, Uganda and the United Kingdom. The speakers were Fikayo Adepoju, Sumaiya Nalukwago and Celeste O. I greatly learnt the value of skill acquisition that goes with a determination to be the best at showcasing your own skills, nobody will do it for you! I also re-learnt that persistence is key and mandatory.

Then came the fourth week… according to the scheme of work laid down to guide our learning, we officially opened the floor to web interactiveness, how the computer and internet work, how to set up coding spaces. Mr. Samuel Ayodele was eloquent as he walked us through the foundations of HTML and CSS and creating responsive designs, was patient enough to take our respective questions. Heretofore, materials were provided everyday on our slack channel for us to study then return afterwards for peer review session.

Worthy of note was the beginning of coding partner session and we were grouped into twos across board. We had one hour Tuesdays and Thursdays to share knowledge before proceeding to the classroom for further sharing.

Later that week, we had a day with Mr. Kadir Salami who was kind enough to share his knowledge with us based on the topic ‘Securing Your Income To The Future’. We also had representatives from TIIDELab’s partnering bodies, ITF (Industrial Training Fund) and NECA ( Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association ) who came around to wish us good tidings and encourage us.

There was a second physical meetup and this time, people in Lagos were able to also meet from a designated location and join virtually as one. Note that meetups are bi-weekly events and during these, exciting and fun games are played to test team building spirit and cooperation among fellows. When I think team spirit, I remember my able team of gallant men and women. I say thank you to all of them for their unbeatable support and cooperation.

To the staff and faculty members of TIIDELab, I say well done for putting up with tech babies and doing everything possible to not only mold us into self-reliant programmers but note-worthy constituents of the society, having the total man concept of dreaming big and exceeding limitations.

I also had my first presentation and the feedback has energised not just me but all members of our respective teams to keep at it, no effort is wasted, no skill is wasted.

At the end of our First Module Exercise Challenge, my team which was paired with team 3 came out the first position with a whooping difference between our scores and those of the runner-up teams!

Here at TIIDELab, your journey to self-reliance is foremost!

Please feel free to go through my portfolio website built with HTML, CSS and Tailwind (a CSS framework)!