Tech 101
(GETTING STARTED WITH TECH)
The tech space is overwhelming. Making an entry into it can be an even more overwhelming phase of one’s life, or not; that opinion is totally subjective. For myself; it involved listening to my brother go on about stuff he loved doing and that was totally fine by me (what with my love for knowing something about everything), going for tech meetups organized by the tech community around me (mostly for the swags), realizing that techies made cool money and that I was a potential golden goose (a girl), then finally getting interested at some point. You could follow this link if you’re interested in knowing about the rest of the journey to where I am now. However, here, I’d be outlining a few tips that could help your transition into the tech space more seamless. They are, however, only based on my experiences and of those around me.
Growing an Interest:
It is almost always an acquired interest for all who ask the question of how to get started with tech. Regardless of how the interest was acquired, it is fine, however far you’ve gone in your quest, to ask questions. If you haven’t, get to identify with the tech community around you and go for events they organize; people sometimes can identify what works for them through those events and get started. These events are not Masterclasses to being some tech guru or whatever as people often make the mistake of going to tech events with some ambiguous expectation that their head will feel heavier with the weight of the knowledge that they have acquired, after which they’d go on and become world-class designers, create websites, hack into other’s sites and a lot more great stuff built off a certain image of a techie in their minds from movies, and books.😂
Find a Tech Community Around You and Join
It is with community we thrive. Finding people with similar interests such as yourself serves to provide you with a lot of people with whom you can rubber duck your problems and learn to fix them. It also helps shorten the learning curve for you as there’s always members of the community that are more learned than you are in certain areas.
Jump Stacks Till You Find Your Niche:
If however, you already got started with the track which you felt at the moment of selection was ‘it’ for you but currently feels like some alien language yet to be mastered, don’t dwell on it any longer. Being in tech should ultimately be for creating innovative solutions to problems. Better, more efficient ways of doing the same monotonous work day in day out. While it may seem like there’s a whole world of options to choose from, for me; and a handful of techies I know personally, the track they are involved in tech is linked to what they like to do, what they always do, as techies or not. A few back end developers I have engaged in conversations as to why they are not full-stack gave the same response “I can’t design for the life of me”. This, of course, isn’t exactly what they all said but it passed the very same message across. Being lovers of logic and the intertwining of it, it only feels natural that they’d prefer to keep at it and not bother on frontend when someone else can handle it. With full-stack developers, however, there was one common ground; the fact that they loved to see the beauty of a whole work done by them as much as they did the logic behind it. I could go on and write about techies I’ve met in other fields, but it’d still result in the same, their natural inclination played out in their tech careers. This is not a proven foolproof plan on how to find a tech niche, but it is a workable blueprint. As tech among many other career paths requires a commitment to be able to develop the necessary skill needed to earn off of, you might as well get into the path that you have some inherent qualities which would help you get started and keep at it.
Building Commitment:
This doesn’t come easy as you didn’t fall in love with tech but rather decided to get into it. In my journey, what has helped me develop a commitment is getting accountable. As I had gotten into an internship program, I had to learn or stand a chance of not making it through the internship. Developing myself in my stack moved from a ‘will do’ to being a ‘have to’. For you, it could be getting a mentor, making short term goals, literally whatever it is you could do to keep you accountable and on your toes.
Keep At It:
I find myself at this stage. Not quite a newbie, yet feeling like I fall short in my tech stack. However, I have simply kept at it, first because I had to, then because I started to see my progress from when I first started to where I am and it was encouraging. I am only able to compare and see my progress because I had previous works to compare with newer ones.
Remind yourself over and again that it is okay to not have tried getting into tech because of an early childhood interest. Whatever brought you in only served as a means to an end, or do I say beginning? You choose.
