Hello, my name is Erick, I have been a software developer for 4+ years now and am fortunate enough to have held multiple roles being that I am a self-taught+bootcamp programmer.
How I started coding
I started coding earlier in high school when my friend Sam, got me into Arduino, programming hardware was so different and exciting, I can recall we won multiple awards for presenting our projects in competitions where even a coding category didn't exist so we had to create projects around what qualified to be a project, one recent example was creating a 3D LCD cube that changed patterns dynamically based on the code running on it in the art section. I loved working with Arduino, just having something physical work the way you want it to is quite different and amazing compared to making a piece of software.
Before I finished high school I started making software and I have never regretted that decision it is the only reason I am where I am currently, but I came to it after I realized programming hardware and electronics is cool but if I wanted to improve myself around it it would end up being costly as access to fabs, microcontroller, and related hardware were scarce and if you did buy them they were quite expensive being a 16-year-old, but I did make myself a promise I will get back to it later on (which I did).
When we left high school we joined a challenge hosted by a local NGO that gave each team funding to build any project that could solve key problems Africans faced. We chose to build a better smart bracelet, the gist of the project was a smart bracelet that would help patients suffering from chronic illnesses and prone to heart attacks have a live monitor on their wrist monitoring vitals and in case of an emergency they could easily use the bracelet to request health emergency services like ambulances, I still used Arduino but we had a Raspberry PI to emulate a ping server on send. The bracelet would connect to your phone and send updates to it when we were building that it was around 2017 and look all smart watches now, Apple unveiled blood oxgyen sensors in 2020, and can even contact health emergency services if you happen to be in one. Unfortunately that was the last time I really programmed my own hardware, I mostly taught it to high school kids through the NGO, loved teaching probably will do that when I hang my coding boots later in life.
Someone at the NGO mentioned we should apply to Andela Kenya, we took the challenge did all their pre-bootcamp challenges and I got picked out of thousands of applicants whoe