Ruth Ikegah
The session for 2021’s International Day of the Girl Child was virtual and held on the 11th of October 2021. The theme being “Digital Generation, Our Generation (not without girls)” was centered around the issues that hinder millions of girls the access to tech-related skills and jobs and the solutions to curb these issues, because the Digital Space can’t function accurately without proper inclusion of the girl child.
Ruth Ikegah, the Guest Speaker for the occasion, is a Technical Content Manager, Backend Developer with Python, GitHub Star and Open-Source Advocate. She gave us an insight into her journey and how it perfectly depicts the struggles of the Girl Child in tech.
The tech journey from a non-technical background:
After graduating with a Micro Biology degree in 2019, I had friends that were coding and designing and because they were really close friends, I began to have interest in tech. In 2020, I started researching on what exact course to do, asking questions, self-learning, taking courses online, watching videos and also started public lessons, meaning I was sharing what I was doing on twitter and participating in the 100 days of coding and engaging with other developers. The tech twitter space in Nigeria is amazing and if you follow some handles, you can benefit from giveaways such as laptops, books and tools that would help you in your tech career. Those were most of the things I benefited from, the community really helped me a lot.
The challenges faced:
Starting a new career fresh out of school was a big decision and there were a lot of challenges that came with it. Self-learning means you would have to consume a lot of data and I didn’t have a job, so it was difficult to support myself even though the courses were free. I also didn’t have a laptop, which compelled me to use my dad’s laptop. This laptop was really old and the ram was at some point useless to me, and there were also issues with the battery that lasted for only an hour and few minutes . Asides that, there wasn’t always power. I had to go to a tech hub that wasn’t close to home, because we had none around our area. Due to construction accross the city, movement was quite difficult as at that time in Port Harcourt, Rivers State-Nigeria. So, I would usually get to the hub really tired before even starting anything. There were also challenges of feeling like I wasn’t making any progress and feeling the imposter syndrome.
Overcoming the challenges:
One thing I was able to do was to make a plan at every stage I found myself, which leads me to talking about the key strategies I applied and how I made headway.
• Consistency– Whilst I was learning, I was engaging in 100 days of coding on twitter and that really helped me stay consistent because if you are one week in and one week out, you are very likely to forget a lot of things but if you do it at least an hour a day it helps information stick. I was able to inculcate consistency in my learning process.
• Focus– The tech space is a very big space, there are a lot of things that are appealing to the eyes, a lot of things you may want to do or be interested in but there is this saying “jack of all trades, master of none”. If you get carried away by trying to do it all, like doing frontend and then backend and you are also trying to learn about cloud and data science, you’d be everywhere with no focus and that is not really helpful because you won’t be able to give your full attention to mastering one thing. It’s not like you can’t switch, you can actually switch because I started with data science but after some time, I found out I wasn’t enjoying looking at data, so I rather did backend with python. So, it’s not like switching isn’t allowed, just don’t do it all at once.
• Network– This is another thing that has helped me so far. When I started, I leveraged on twitter to meet other experts in the field and started following a lot of engineers that I wanted to be like which also helped similar contents appear on my timeline because the timeline is filtered according to the handles you follow. I started looking for programming topics to follow which made other programming topics appear on my timeline. I also found a way to ask relevant questions that were helpful and was able to build a strong network. I am still networking; you never stop networking because it creates a lot of opportunities. People can recommend you for stuff, you can get nominated for awards and gain recognition just by having the right network. Look out for value and also offer them value whilst you do so.
Advice to the Girl Child:The world is going digital and everything involves technology. I would encourage you to get into tech. Being a girl child, I was required to do a lot of chores in the house. In a typical African home, everything falls on the girl and being the only girl amid four boys, one can only imagine. So, aside going far to the tech hub, I had to do house chores before going out and when I get back, I still had to do house chores. My mother would also say “You’re a girl, what do you need all these for?” and those statements were very discouraging. The challenges would definitely come and there would be challenges of being the only lady working amongst men in the tech field but you have to understand that you have goals and that’s what you should focus on. Put your mind on the goal because these are challenges that would pass. Right now, I have a job and can afford to live alone, and this has curbed the family challenges. So, the one thing I would say is keep the focus and continue because the challenges would always be there, but you have a goal to achieve.
To share your ideas and suggestions, please send an email to code@developersinvogue.org