Leveling Up : My TIIDELab Journey 1.0 .

Erica Jong said "The best part of the journey is the surprise and wonder along the way", The saying has never been clear to me until my first-month experience in TIIDELab. My name is Effiong Divine, and this article will be a briefing on my first month as a TIIDELab fellow.

TIIDELab is a program that helps youth develop skills to enhance their self-reliance, and how I got into TIIDELab fellowship cohort 5 was quite exciting and surprising to me, others might say otherwise because I had prior knowledge. After all, I made it to the pre-fellowship and graduated with flying colors, but the latter is not the case I still had the "IMPOSTER" syndrome in me, making me feel I wasn't good enough to be in the fellowship, but against my will, I applied for a slot in the fellowship, and a few days later I got an email preparing me for the tasks or tests I had to do to secure a slot in the fellowship. It was quite a struggle, but I made it; I secured a slot and was also among the 60 applicants to be on a full scholarship.

Minutes became days and days became weeks and it was finally time for the onboarding of the new cohort, and I was so anxious and could not wait to start my "journey to self-reliance", as we kicked off with the learning process The first week was a beginner-friendly one, starting us with tools we would need as developers like Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and the like, and also introducing us to guest speakers not just speakers but insightful guest speakers who told us what we would experience as budding developers and how we could come out successful in our career. The first few days, I felt like an alien; everything I heard and practiced felt strange. To make it worse, we had to relate with our colleagues, and being a reserved individual, that task was a hard one, but to be a butterfly, I had to break out of my cocoon.

Advancing into the journey, I got to meet different individuals of different calibers who had different mindsets, and believe me, there is nothing as beautiful as that, We broke the chains of virtual interaction and had physical meetups where our program coordinator, Mr. Aderoju Shamsudeen, continuously taught us how far soft skills would take us in our journey as developers while equipping our minds with fun games and tasks to help with problem-solving and decision-making skills. If I were to describe our physical meetups in one word, I would say "AWESOME".

I surprised myself, firstly, with how I got the role of team leader. It wasn't my first time leading a group of remarkable individuals, but this time I was the only male team leader in the whole cohort, and for some reason that was indeed special. The only way I can cope with the role of a team leader and dealing with humans (which seems to be hard) is through the teachings on attitude, communication, teamwork, and other soft skills from Mr. Shamsudeen (or Mr. Shams as we call him) and also the corrections he always renders when I go astray, I will always commend him anywhere for his greatness and impact in the lives of youths.

There’s a saying we use a lot in Cohort 5, "bumpy smooth ride." The irony describes my technical journey in TIIDELab Cohort 5. We were blessed with intelligent and insightful instructors and teachers that tutored us on Data structure and algorithms, HTML, CSS, and CSS frameworks like Tailwind. My favorite lesson was mostly on advanced CSS and CSS frameworks The tutors say a lot, but one thing I won't forget is that, as a budding developer, "flow with the process." That phrase speaks to me. It is pretty unreal to learn all that in a month but that's what TIIDELab does; they train us to be unreal and above average with my new technical skills I've been able to develop websites my best so far is my portfolio site (you can see it by tapping on the word "my portfolio site") I have also been able to carry out other mini projects that I never knew I could develop Most of my projects were made using HTML and CSS, but what made my portfolio my best was the use of the CSS framework Tailwind, which increased my thirst to complete more projects.

All these milestones, and it's just the first month, I really can't wait to level up, just like I said earlier, "The best part of the journey is the surprise and wonder along the way." by Erica Jong, I can't wait for more surprises and wonders, and I also can't wait to update you all on it Stay tuned, as I will be dropping other articles. Do not forget to follow me and like this article, You can also contact me on LinkedIn @Effiong Divine I'll see you in my next article.