Hey peeps, It’s been a while and I missed y’all for reals! Excited to be back on another episode of the Junior engineer chronicles! It’s been two months since I published my first episode and alot has changed ever since! Join me on this trail as I share my learnings and growth with y’all.

Better understanding of programming concepts

I work primarily as a frontend engineer in my workplace, and as such, I use React and Typescript on a daily basis. In the past two months, there were some concepts I couldn’t undersatnd in React. Things like: props passing from parent to child, hooks, React Portals, renderProps, etc. I found it really difficult to understand these things because I haven’t used most of these techniques in a real life scenario. Over the past 2 months, I have been able to work on tasks that requires I implement these approaches. This led me to study about them and get comfortable implementing these solutions. In my honest opinion, I have figred the best way to learn programming concepts is to practice them.

Improved communication

I used to find it very difficult to explain technical problems or solutions to my teammates. Actually, I still do but I think I’ve gotten better over the past few months. I think what did the trick for me was following an advice a colleaague of mine gave to me a while ago which was: Don’t be in a haste to speak, take sometime to organize your thoughts before voicing them out. Sounds easy yeah, but trust me when I tell you its hard to live by this principle. I’ve painstakinly followed this principle and I’ve seen the positive results it has yielded for me.

Assisting other colleagues with technical problems

This is the major highlight for me! Let me tell you a story. Few weeks ago, some of my colleagues at work reached out to me to assist them with some frontend-related technical challenge. At first, I was scared of helping out because I felt I have little experience in React and so, I didn’t want to disgrace myself if my solution fails. I thought of how dissapointed my coleagues might be if eventually I didn’t come up with the correct solution. Regardless of all these odds, I decided to volunteer my time to help. I told myself I’m better off trying than letting this learning opportunity pass me by; worst case, I propagate the issue to my team and everyone would brainstorm on the solution. After some pair programming sessions and some googling, I came up with a potential solution. To my greatest surprise, it worked! I really can’t explain the amount of joy I and my colleagues felt! I felt really proud of myself. It was more or less, a good indication that I’m actually growing in this craft. I’m really looking forward to helping my colleagues with any frontend-related issue on a daily basis!

Speaking and event organizing opportunities

This was another major highlight for me. I was opportuned to serve as a co-organizer and speaker at the pioneer cloud-native event here in Africa- Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Africa. Kubernetes Community Days are community organized events that gathers adopters and technologists from open source and cloud native communities to learn, collaborate, and network to further advancement in Kubernetes. They also are a lot of fun and a great way to meet new people and build community. KCD Africa was a huge success! We had over 700+ attendees, 330+ checkins, and over 25+ qualified speakers. You can check our community page on Twitter to learn more about the event and the community.

Imposter syndrome feeling still exist but getting better.

In the last episode, I mentioned how I was battling with imposter syndrome and how I’ve been able to manage it. Fast forward till today, I think I’ve gotten a lot better and I feel it makes sense to say that Imposter syndrome gets better over time. The more I work on tasks on a daily basis, the less I feel like an imposter.

That’s it folks! Thanks for reading and see you in the next one!