The mindset needed to overcome challenges

It was on the 3rd of July, that I got an email from Andela inviting me to the boot camp, I was overcome with happiness. To be frank, it was not my first application so imagine my happiness. Later in the day I got the preparation materials and went through it, I was familiar to so concept and to some others never heard of them until that day. Well, it was a learn material thought I had little time to prepare, but before I could do much challenge 1 and 2 were out.

I went through challenge 1 with a smirk on my face because we were told to implement the front end with html, CSS and JavaScript, no functionality just views. Woo, how hard could that be then suddenly something slapped the smirk off my face. What was that? Do not use any CSS framework. For a long time, I have not designed any application with pure CSS. I always use CSS framework while designing. Anyway, I have always seen challenges as a requirement for growth and that what this was to me. Another avenue to learn and grow, I had to relearn CSS, checkout documentation for features that are unfamiliar to me. From there I got better with CSS and was able to complete the project before its deadline.

Then came challenge 2, creating API Endpoints, coming from php and laravel, the idea of Api was not new to me, I have been working with routes and api for a while but testing, Test Driven Development (TDD) I have heard about it alot but I have never written a code to test my application. I have always done my route testing manually using postman. I had to learn TDD. After which I had to study TravisCI. I omitted the dot in front of travis.yml and it took me a whole day to figure out why my TravisCI was not working. Any issue I encountered while working on my project, I check them up online, if that does solve the issue, I will meet up with colleagues or mentor, and keep searching until I get a solution.

One thing I have come to realize is that for me to be successful as a programmer, I need to always have a growth mindset. Software development is a very evolving field and for you not to the left behind, you need to have a growth mindset. Also keep an open mind to learning new things, collaborate with other and seek for feedback on your performance.

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