Transitioning to a new path in tech can be quite overwhelming and intimidating. For people with non-technical backgrounds, it can be difficult to enter a new world full of diverse roles, terminologies, and skills. There is always something new to learn. The good news is that the tech community is a welcoming one that can make this transition a little better.
She Code Africa, a non-profit organization dedicated to honoring and empowering young girls and women, launched the second cohort of their cloud school, and I applied, took the assessment, and was pleased to be accepted.
Although getting into the cloud school program is one thing; scaling the program is quite another. I had to find a balance between work and the program. It has been all about determination and consistency, in my opinion.
We were divided into groups and mentors were assigned to steer our learning path during the program. I admire the mentors because, despite having full-time jobs, they have been patient with responding to our questions and helping with blockers. There’s usually a monthly evaluation task to determine who would scale to the next month. We also held general calls on a monthly basis.
Personal shout out to my mentor Olatokunbo Alege for always being available to answer questions and the many words of encouragement 😊😊
This is my third month so that means I have passed two monthly evaluations
So here is a breakdown of what I have learned so far
Month 1:
The first month we were introduced to the concept of DevOps, Basic Linux system administration, Virtualization, and Web Servers which required the installations of software like virtual box, vagrant amongst others. The first month was challenging and having to balance cloud school and work was quite tasking. But it has been worth it. I have learned how to set up a virtual machine with vagrant, building containers with dockers, configuring Nginx.
Month 2:
In the second month, I learned the different cloud service models, CI/CD with Jenkins, Circle CI, and Travis CI, how to set up a Jenkins server, create a VPC with private and public subnet, infrastructure provisioning with Terraform and Ansible. Basically how to work on the cloud
My advice for anyone starting out is, Know yourself
If you don’t know why you want to transition into tech or why you are partaking in the cloud school (like my case) you’re going to get intimidated and lost when things get hard along the way. And believe me when I say that transitioning careers and learning new skills is a huge challenge. There will always be individuals who are better than you, so don't be afraid. Work at your own pace. Discover a learning style that works for you. Some people learn visually, while others prefer to read books or documentation. Choose the best one for you.
Google is your best friend
Research research and research
I cannot emphasize this enough but google should be your best friend and companion. There are people who have gone through this process before you and possibly got the same errors that you are getting now. So you can always find answers online, and if you dont, you can always reach out to your mentor or someone else in the field who knows.
Document your Progress
Documentation is very important. It serves as a reference when you get stuck or it can be useful to someone else. Document your errors too and when you resolve them, write down how you were able to solve them. Document the steps you took when carrying out any task. It helps you understand better. I started documenting errors that I encountered while installing certain types of software. It is still a work in progress but you can see it here
I’ll update this again after my third month
Cheers to 3 months of learning cloud 🥂🥂