Willicent Mbugua

From a Filmaker to a Software Engineer in 2 years

After my secondary school I education i enrolled for a film/video production course. Full of naivety and hopes to break into Hollywood someday. The urge to film school was also light when a friend who I really admired their work on instagram invited me over to a shoot session. He taught me some camera basics using his Lumix camera which was a mirrorless full frame.This camera's performance was insane back then. So as i joined college i had a rough idea in mind of the type of filmmaker i wanted to be. During orientation, I was seated next to a guy named James when the head of film department asked us to introduce ourselves by mentioning why we want to pursue film.At the end of James' introduction he mentioned he owned a camera and he had done some YouTube videos before. Fast forward, that's how we became very good friends from day one.With the help of James i managed to shoot, edit and post my first YouTube video as early as 3 weeks as a fresher. I was really passionate about film.I made Youtubevarsity my go to library of knowledge.Within a very short time i was really far ahead my classmates in terms of skills.I once made my pocket money by helping groups do their final year projects while i was in second year. Then, the pandemic happened.The world was flipped in a very short span.I personally got affected by the pandemic since my parent didn't survive retrenchment at their company. I was now torn in the thin line between passion and sacrifice. This was a red pill - blue pill scenario.This is how i mad my first mature decision as a man - I sacrificed my passion for sanity.So i dropped out of campus.This called for a huge mental shift but i survived.I came back home and tried out other things, some successful others a flop but i learnt a lot. I was a graphic designer at a local CBO while i saw an advert for a Software Engineering scholarship at ALX.I applied having no prior knowledge of computer science or even owning a laptop.Well, I am the biggest risk taker i know of so why not.As mental preparation i started attending tutorial lessons at Youtubevarsity on web development and an oasis of a new passion got me. I started learning HTML and CSS to create the website and at the same time UIUX skills for design.This was very rewarding and at the same time stressful.But i can say that i am built for hard things.I was lucky enough to get a mentor at this early stage. My journey was concurrent with John's(my programming godfather) journey of starting a school where he would share his skills with young techies. I became his first student. I also got admitted to the Software Engineering course. This is how how i broke into tech. Through continous learning i upgraded from just HTML and CSS and added functionality using Javascript.This not being enough, i started exploring the frontend frameworks such as Reactjs and my favorite - Nextjs, backend frameworks such as Nodejs, database management systems such as SQL and NoSQL databases, version control like Git, CICD pipelines such as Circle Ci and Jenkins and many more technologies. It is so clear to me now that my passion was not suppose to be in film it was just a proxy to get me into tech.The far I have come has greatly been a result of staying curious and networking.I feel more confident to tackle the future since there is fulfillment and financial future proof in this field.Fixing bugs and broken gives me an orgasmic satisfaction since I am a fixer by nature. I still believe that with Code everything is Possible.