I’m not entirely sure if that topic works but what can I say, it’s up for deliberation. Henry asked me to tell a compelling story about my creative tech journey. Whether it’s going to be compelling or inspiring is up to you to judge but I’m going to at least try to make it an entertaining one at best.
So five years ago, I got into university to study Computer Science. I wasn’t pressured into doing so, I just had a thing for messing around with computers. Tell me which child wasn’t fascinated by screens? I had even carved a niche for myself. Pilfering my parent’s phones to play mobile games. More than that though, I felt Computer Science was one of those widely enabling courses you could study but still end up in another field like Business Management.
As a pre-requisite, we had to learn the basics of a bunch of programming languages like Java, C#, C++ etc. and in my first year I won an award as the best programmer of the year. I still think it wasn’t necessarily because I was that good at programming but more because well, I was more known than the other badass programmers at the time.
Anyway, in my third year we had this compulsory 6 month SIWES program. And I really believe that this was where things started to get interesting. Initially my mother asked me to go intern for the Lagos State Government’s IT Department. I was like “Noooooo. I don’t want old men with pot bellies and bulging eyes. I want young guys with sexy legs and deep voice.” Sha. I asked around and eventually, I found myself in a startup digital agency. Hostsleek. Of course as many Nigerian startup companies are, they thrive off the input of interns, so there was no time to sit back and admire sexy legs. Well, not too much time.
I started off with learning how to use WordPress to design websites. At the time I thought I was actually building websites (I would be shocked later) and I felt really good about myself. I did Ecommerce sites (stores), regular websites for like schools, ran blogs for people etc. Sometimes when work was slow and the day dragged on, I’d latch onto the graphic designer and ask for stuff to do. He’d give me stuff to ‘learn to do’ and from there I picked up Photoshop, Illustrator and a couple of cool music too.
When my 6 months was up (they did this send forth party with pizzas and Sprite. No alcohol though since we were ‘just kids’), I continued ‘learning to do’ stuff. 3D Rendering, Video Editing, Mobile App Development etc. I mean all these things were good to know and I truly wanted to know just about everything. I thought it would make me relevant considering the tech space is always evolving. I also thought it’d make my portfolio look cool. Problem was, I didn’t have the patience to settle for one thing. I wasn’t even sure what to settle for because I ‘kind of liked’ everything.
And then my moment of truth arrived (remember the TV show? I absolutely hated watching it.). I took a course in my final year. Human Computer Interaction. That was like my best course in my whole four year program. It was like how can you fuse design, psychology and algorithms together? Like that’s one heck of a Fusion Gem (Steven Universe fans in the house can I get a whoop!) and it just blew my mind away. After the course, I promised myself I would go study it for my Masters.
But then I got out of school and life happened. While in the space of life happening, I started doing some research on HCI. Sadly, it’s not a particularly popular field of study in Nigeria so I resolved to take online courses. I was still playing around with WordPress and earning off it when I one of my friends challenged me and said “You use WordPress to design? For real? If you want to do some really serious Front-end Development, why don’t you go for HTML, CSS, JS?” It made a lot of sense because honestly I was becoming bored of the constant drag and drop business and it was beginning to make me lazy.
So I jumped on the Front-end Development train. It was a mix of easy and difficult at the same time. Easy because I already had a background knowledge of programming and difficult because there wasn’t a particular direction to follow. You’d ask for help from experts you know and if you’re lucky what you’ll get is links upon links of stuff to read about and videos to watch. If you’re not lucky, they’d tell you “Ask Google bruh.” And there was that underlying pressure of wanting to be good at it really fast. My advice for anyone in this state now is “Chill, and follow Zell Liew on social media.” He was super helpful.
To round up this long gist, while I was pumping my Front-end Developer muscles, I realized there was such a thing as User Experience and User Centered Design. And I was like “Oh wow.” It was like that rush of goodness all over again I’d felt while taking HCI in school. This time though I didn’t spend too much time groping around the internet for direction. I got enrolled in a UX program here in Lagos with Think Senpai. It’s been super amazing and I can only hope for the best.
I realize though that this is what happens a lot of times in the creative space. You try this and try that until you find what you are really interested in. What I do need now is some major ass pep talk on patience and consistency. Lol.
