My journey with ALC (Andela learning community) on the Google Africa scholarship (ALC 3.0) for mobile web specialist nanodegree program.
I want to introduce myself first, I’m a freelancer Full-Stack Developer with a Front-end Focus, I have more than 4 years building web apps and websites; I’m interested in PWA, performance, accessibility and UX.
I recently graduated as a Mobile Web Specialist from Udacity, which gives me the skills to provide additional services to my clients, such as building PWAs.
In this article I will share with you this experience, maybe it can help you some way.
As always the first thing I do when I wake up is check my email, one day I received two emails, the first one told me that I was not selected to have a Data Analyst nanodegree from the One Million Arab Coders Initiative which I participated in, I learned a lot from, it wasn’t difficult since I’m familiar with statistics and probability and I have a solid background with databases and specifically with SQL, but the competition was tough, many participants had a strong knowledge and experience as a data analyst, making it difficult to compete, since this is the first time I have dealt with these types of challenges.
The second mail was another chance for me, I was accepted to the Google Africa Challenge Scholarship on the Mobile Web Specialist track to get an MWS nanodegree, and also join the Andela Learning Community.
It was a chance for me to correct my mistakes from my previous experience and seize this opportunity.
I have started by joining the community with colleagues sharing the same interest, we were from different countries and cultures, we helped and motivated each other by sharing, suggesting and supporting.
The courses were pretty hard for me since it’s about new concepts and APIs, like service worker, cache API and new JavaScript stuff which was the first time I deal with it, that give me an additional motivation to learn more, understand and practice everything, which took a lot of time and effort.
Google Africa Challenge Scholarship was about three months, the last 7 days of the program was a practical challenge which would have an important factor to determine the nanodegree winners, it’s was about building a currency converter progressive web app, my strategy was to build the app correctly with a clean code and also meet the lighthouse audit with the maximum score, to increase my chances of being chosen, since the competition was very high, most participants had strong skills and experience in the field
This is the app I have made, you can find the code here, and I have built it from scratch.
I remember it was at the beginning of the football world cup, I worked hard to be able to watch the matches :)
I was very satisfied with my work; I knew that I have a great chance to be chosen this time.
And yes, I was selected among the top 100 participants from 16,000 participants to have 6 months of MWS nanodegree.
The classes were great, I’ve improved my front-end development skills, including web accessibility, dynamic & offline capable web apps and performance web apps, through practical stages building an app, by scale it on every stage using and practicing what we have learned, meeting the given requirements to be validated by the reviewers.
What’s great about this nanodegree is not only the techniques stuff, they also help you to show your profiles in an appropriate way, they offered to us two courses to improve our profiles LinkedIn and GitHub, with a professional review to give us tips and advices, which is great to present ourselves to the potential recruiter with the right way.
And since we were just 100 learners, we helped and supported each other even more, without forgetting the ALC mentoring and support, which helped me to successfully complete the nanodegree on time with an additional app on my portfolio.
This is my certification here.
This is the app I have build through the stages, you can see the source code here.
This my GitHub profile here.
This my LinkedIn profile here.
Today, I know much more than before on my African continent, I have watched a lot of documentaries about it, now I have friends and contacts from different African countries, I became interested in visiting African countries more than any other place in the world, I love the nature and the simplicity and the kindness of the African locals.
It wasn’t easy to get to manage my work as a freelancer while learning and passing the stages, but I think I have succeeded the most of the time to make the best balance between, sometimes I have chosen to learn new stuff over working just for gaining money.
These skills now allow me to offer new services to my clients, including the PWA and its ecosystem.
The great ALC also offered a free 4 months Pluralsight subscription to us to scale and improve more our skills especially in PWAs and JavaScript, which I benefit from it to learn new stuff and test and improve also my knowledge about JavaScript.
This is what I got from Pluralsight.
And this is not the all, the ALC noticed that I was super motivated and excited about Pluralsight since I have finished the given courses in a record time, which led them to give me the opportunity to mentor the other learners to finish the challenges by completing the courses as well.
It was a great experience to help my friends, brothers, and sisters, to learn more, and me too I have learned a lot from them, all the best for all of them!
ALC is not just a community, it’s a family, a big family, I’m very honored to be part of this community and to be involved in improving it.
I remain very grateful to Google, Udacity, Pluralsight, and Andela for the wonderful opportunity and also the ALC community (Auwalms, …) for their support.
This is my ALC journey and success story and I am just one person out of many. As Umar Yusuf said.
#alcwithgoogle #alcSuccessStories #googleafricascholarship
