I began my sojourn into tech some time during the end of October 2021 with a keen interest in Cloud Computing. It began as a self –taught journey, but I soon realized a little difficulty in finding structured learning courses/resources for absolute beginners like myself. You could find a whole lot of these for web development, web design, etc. but it was a struggle to figure out where exactly to start from and what was needed as a newbie in Cloud Computing/Engineering. This brings me to one purpose of starting this blog: I hope that through the documentation of my journey online, a beginner somewhere, sometime, would find some level of insight & guidance in the beginning stages of their learning.
Back to my journey. From the research I had carried out, I discovered that it is always a good idea to have some basic knowledge of the building blocks of the web: HTML & CSS. While this isn’t a mandatory pre-requisite for Cloud Computing, it could be an added advantage. So this was where I began. I hopped on Udemy & enrolled for this incredible course by Andrei Neagoie called The Complete Web Developer: Zero to Mastery I spent the first month on this course learning HTML, CSS, Bootstrap & Javascript amongst others. I eventually got an additional course by Jonas Schmedtmann The Complete Javascript Course which I highly, highly recommend for its very practical & comprehensive content.
Early November 2021, I bumped into the twitter page of a newly launched educational institution named AltSchool Africa They were offering online Diploma courses in Software Engineering, and Cloud Engineering was one of the course options. I immediately took an interest and made further enquiries. A few days later, I applied to be part of the first cohort, got accepted and eventually took an entry assessment test which I passed. Classes officially began in February 2022. The first (out of three) semester had students study the fundamentals of HTML, CSS & Javascript regardless of their chosen track. Guess I was on the right path, huh? Coupled with some of the knowledge I had from my initial self – learning attempt, I built a few simple beginner projects: A basic landing page, a background generator, tip calculator, a dice game, a portfolio site and a basic but functional calculator amongst others. By the second semester, we were divided into our respective chosen tracks and I excitedly began my foray into Cloud Engineering.
From here on, I will document details of the Cloud Engineering topics covered, tasks & exercises, resources, projects, related experiences and so on. By doing so, I hope to look back in a year from now and celebrate my progress thus far. Again, I hope some/all of these information will serve as some point of reference to someone who may need it someday.
Here's to new beginnings! 🥂