Introduction

It has been 7 months and counting since I started my tech journey and I must say it has been full of different challenges. These challenges made me sometimes believed my village people were after me until I read a comment written by one of 2020 Data Science Nigeria bootcamp competition participant on Zindi,then I realized I’m not alone.

Constant Power Failure

To be productive as a programmer, electricity is one sure thing you need constantly. Reverse is the case at where I live. Don’t bother google searching the worst area with poor electricity. I freely tell you it’s where I stay. Coupled with the fact that I have an online writing job , I only try to do so much within little time light is available.

Most of the time, I do not achieve my plan for the day. Power failure was the reason I couldn’t get qualified for DSN 2020 Bootcamp. My area light got spoilt for over a week on the exact day we were asked to submit our code script for an interview call. During She Code Africa Mentorship program, electricity played a part in not being too much active as expected even though my Mentor was amazing to make things easy for me. What I do most times for my online course is wake up by midnight to download videos and watch offline later to preserve power and then I learnt to download more of articles offline and read.

Internet Connectivity Problem

This is the most frustrating of them all. I missed a lot of tech meetings and classes because of this. I literary walk around the house with my laptop and my phone in both hands searching for network. I remembered going out of the house by past 11pm in search of network just not to miss a competition deadline set to be 11:59pm that same day. Even though I was scared, I had no choice than to search for good spot to get strong internet connection with my heart beating fast.

This played a great role in making my learning journey not as much interesting as it should be but I’ve learnt that nothing good comes easy.

Data Subscription

When I advanced in my Data science career and I had to learn Computer Vision and NLP. Started with tensorflow and there were libraries I needed to download. According to one of our mentors in Data Science Ife Community, he advised we run our codes on colab instead and we will have not to worry too much about libraries and dependencies. I was still trying to install the libraries considering the fact I will need to work offline sometimes due to electricity challenge. I had to change my jupyter notebook environment from CPU to GPU. During the learning process, I realized I needed to download libraries and more libraries. It was at that point I gave up despite the data I’ve used in downloading them. I now make use of Colab and Kaggle kernel.

Understanding Codes

While working, right from when I started coding and till now, I do come across bugs which might take up minutes and sometimes days to fix. Bugs do frustrate me at the earlier stages of my tech journey but as I kept coding, I realized for any bug that exists, I’m not doing something right. Instead of being frustrated, I take my time to go through all my codes again to sort it out. I sometimes reach out to people that are more experienced than me to fetch it out for me.

Funding(Transport fare)

6 months into my tech journey, I decided to face my challenges and solve them. Sitting at home to code with all these challenges that exist where I stay is definitely not doing me good. I reached out to some people to make enquiry if an hub exists in my town. Someone referred me to an hub, I was told the monthly charge is #15,000. During my research, a friend recommended I go to campus and make use of intecu to access internet since I live where I’m schooling. I calculated my transport fare to the hub location and the daily transport fare for a month and it sums up #21,000. I calculated transport fare to campus and the average intecu I need to purchase per day and it sums up to #13, 200. I later went for the campus option. I made use of the money I raised for my writing jobs for that particular month. Some friends I made on campus while going actually thought I already have a data science job due to the financial sacrifice I made but I believed whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. Since then, the learning process has taken a much easier route compared to former.

Hardware Challenge

3 weeks ago my laptop started going off at 50%. As at now, it goes off at 78%. If you call my system a television, you are definitely right. I’m currently trying to get a new battery but preferably a much better laptop strong enough to support my programming skill. I only code when there is light now.

Conclusion

All those challenges above are enough for me to actually give up but I actually continued fighting my way through because I’m a goal getter. I’m still learning by the way but I believed a brighter future is ahead of me. Whatever you find doing, give it your best shot.