It all started in November last year when I almost lost my life for the 2nd time, I could barely breathe with the tubings in my chest and I spent my time pondering about all the life decisions, good and bad, but to be honest mostly bad, that led me to be in that position of my life.
I felt chained, unable to do what I wanted to the most, which was to experience this world and my life meaningfully and also be able to share those experiences with the ones I hold dear to my heart. I was frustrated and for two months I felt weak, not only physically but also mentally, I felt like an impostor, I felt like I wasn’t even worthy of oxygen, that my existence in this world was rather selfish since I knew that I was brought up relatively privileged.Â
So, I decided to just “screw it”, I’m going to live the best life possible and I started by doing something that I always wanted to do but never really had the time for.
So, I signed up for lynda.com, which to my surprise is now LinkedIn Learning and before I finished my second lesson on programming I knew that this was the thing I wanted to do, perhaps not for the rest of my life, but I liked it, not because it was hard, but because of the byproduct of going through it and at the end be able to build something from scratch.
If you’re like me, you’re probably already wondering, how does Lambda School come into play?
Well it all started with some research, I wanted to learn how to code but I knew myself, and back then it would take rigorous self-discipline to accomplish that goal and I wasn’t sure I was up to the task while simultaneously learning how to code, and I wanted to do it the good way. I wanted to write readable code from the start!
Fast forward to March of this year, I was once again taken by surprise by my health condition but after undergoing what was hopefully my last surgery, I was set to become a Lambda School Full-Time student enrolling in their Fullstack Web Developer & Computer Science course.
I didn’t know what to expect but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and surely enough the preparation I did by following the free open-source curriculum called The Odin Project, was also not going to be enough. Long-story-short, I was dead spot-on, it wasn’t enough and I found myself learning at a pace that I wasn’t used to and surprisingly a pace that I was comfortable with.
Ok, but what did Lambda School do for me to be prone to failure?
I’d like for you to visualize the programming universe as Hell, Errors as low-level demons and Bugs as high-level demons and like in Hell, there is no escaping, there is no other path than survive, so in the case of programming, everybody’s goal should be striving to keep learning.
What Lambda School does for its students is to pave a road of incredible difficulty and they don’t help you along the way unless absolutely necessary. Instead, our amazing Instructor thought us how to befriend the low-level demons and use them to our advantage when fighting against the high-level demons and by doing so, Lambda managed to find a system that throws its students to the fiery pits and push them to become comfortable with failure while striving to succeed.
If you look at it from a geeky-ish perspective, the TDD (Test Driven Development) way of doing things is failing first to succeed later, and it just works.
What I’m trying to say is that if you don’t push yourself, if you don’t take risks, you will end up by limiting your potential by a lot, you’re capable of so much and you aren’t even aware of it. I hope this brings empowers you to do something new tomorrow and push yourself, if you do you’ll find out that the motivation you were looking for is just a by-product of doing it
Closing words
Since the beginning of the course, I thought about writing an article post about my experience at Lambda School after I completed the Web Development portion of the course.
Tomorrow I prepare myself for my last sprint challenge which evaluates my skills on “Authentication and Testing”, and the week after I will start my training to become a Team Lead for the next 8 weeks which will prepare myself to become one of the Team Leads for the upcoming Fullstack Web development European Cohort which will probably also welcome students from the African Continent.
I hope you liked this read, and I apologize in advance for my novice writing skills.