The Journey of a 17 year old Android Developer
This MEET THE BOSS session was with Zainab Jimoh a.k.a. Zee or Zenny, a 17 year old Android Developer who is passionate about Tech and has aspiration of becoming a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Nigeria. She is currently studying Computer Science with Mathematics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria.
Zainab was introduced to coding by her sister’s friend in 2017, fell in love with Java and she joined an online learning platform ‘Codecademy’ to become better at it.
She did her Internship with Hotels.NG (HNG) a tech company in Nigeria and was allowed to intern remotely which was pretty hard a first but she got a hang of it. She was assigned a mentor Eniola Ipoola, a Software Developer at Law Pavilion Group who advised and carried her along through her first project.
Interning at HNG was a bit stressful because she had to manage a team and every result depended on team efforts, though she loved to work alone she had to learn how to become a team leader, player and a developer all at once. When she finished her internship in December, she moved on to learning how to use Kotlin to build Android Applications in 2019.
Zainab attended her first tech conference DEVFest at Lagos in November 2019, she was star struck at how many people were in the tech industry especially the women who code with JAVA and others Kotlin. During the festival she met Moyin Adeniyi the 1st Android GDE in Nigeria.
Don’t be afraid to do what you want especially when people don’t believe you can. Don’t listen to the voices that tell you that you can’t, you can do it you just need to type in those lines of code. ~ Zainab Jimoh
Lessons learnt from Zainab
Learn to celebrate the small wins: She said “when i made my first application i made a loud announcement about it on social media and also bragged about it to my friends and family. Looking back now that app was crappy and full of bugs but I was happy about it anyway.”
Take up a challenge: At the end of last year she wrote a resolution that she was going to join the 100 days coding challenge and she did.
Get yourself a mentor: She signed up for SheCode Africa mentorship program which is for 12 weeks because she needed someone to stir her in the right direction, help her focus and watch her grow. So far she has 3 mentors Emmanuel Kehinde a Senior Mobile Engineer at Turing Inc, Eniola Ipoola and Stack Overflow an online platform.
Find what works for you: “Find what works for you, it could be reading blog posts or articles, watching video tutorials, going for bootcamps or having a mentor but whatever it is hold on to it hard.”
Learn to network: “Networking is very important, you get to be in a circle of like minds of people who are beginners, intermediate or experienced. Everyone has gone through the same problem you are trying to fix so ask questions when you get the chance.”