ALX first week

It's been a week since I made a post about being accepted into the ALX Software Engineering programme. Well, this is me telling you how the first week was, so get excited. I know I don't really need to make a writeup about it and I'm not sure I'll be consistent with this but the emotions swelling up within need to be expressed or I just might get overwhelmed.

So the week started with setting goals straight and ascertaining that this was truly the path one had to take. Well, this involves sacrificing a year of our lives so we had to be sure it was worth it. Believe me, it was! Without wasting any time, we were already bombarded with projects from the second day, accompanied with various resources to consume. Well, most of the projects on that day was to actually familiarize ourselves with the important tools we would be using throughout the course of this program so it definitely was necessary, I wouldn't say it was expected tho, at least not by the majority, considering the first two weeks were tagged "onboarding" and aren't actually part of the "year" the program is scheduled for. What's more? We were required to submit the projects before 6:00am the next day in Nigerian time. It really was a reliever that I started preparing a day before.

On the third day, I received an email informing me that some new projects had been released, part of which included a project on shell navigation, along with voluminous resources. Personally I didn't have issues with it but that was only because I had been preparing for shell, as well as some other concepts even before onboarding. Yes, most of the most recent cohort members actually had an idea of the first few topics to expect thanks to a benevolent participant from the previous cohort. However even with this information, a great number of members still struggled. I hate to imagine what might have happened if we weren't armed with any information whatsoever. It was thrilling helping fellow cohort members out though. For an introvert, I didn't think I would have so much fun guiding people I was meeting for the first time.

Another day and I had to complete some other projects. This time the projects were based on both vim and emacs as text editors. I had a little issue with emacs, not that I didn't know how to answer the questions but the "checker" kept failing my work; suggesting I didn't enter the correct answers. I confirmed that I was saving my work but that still wasn't working. It then occurred to me that it could be because I was not closing the file after saving. I did that and boom it worked. After figuring that out, I had no issue solving the remaining tasks. However, I'd already destroyed my sandbox a couple of times while struggling with the first task and had no idea the previous day's works were deleted till I'd almost completed the emacs task. I panicked when I realized and accidentally deleted the emacs tasks too. Eventually I had to redo the tasks on both emacs and shell. To make matters worse, there was no power but I figured out how to use my mobile phone thanks to this.

The final day of the week and I had two more projects, one of which was based on git. Honestly I was both very excited and scared about Git. I've been looking forward to it but I've also been skeptical due to nightmares I once had while practicing it. Also, the experience I had due to destroying my sandbox the previous day didn't help matters. Unlike the other projects which I faced head-on, I was kinda reluctant to start. Anyways I summoned courage from my faith in the Almighty and started. Surprisingly I had no issue with the tasks; at least the mandatory. I completed the mandatory tasks and was eager to unlock the advanced. The first advanced task was to merge and resolve a conflict. I felt this wasn't difficult and delved right through and did it, only for one of the checks to be marked red. Apparently I successfully resolved the conflict, but the merge didn't happen? How is that even possible? I tried "remerging" but the command line kept giving the output "up to date". I even officially joined stack overflow(earlier I'd only used it for issues but never signed up) because of this but no breakthrough. I then took a break from that task and in five minutes after that, it dawned on me; could i have forgotten to push? I went back immediately, tried that and voila; it worked. At that moment, "git push" felt like the holy grail to me lol. I finished the second advanced task but not without any hitch either.

Overall, my first week in the ALX SE programme was really exciting and I look forward to the next. I'm really confident the fire of passion within me will only grow bigger and shine brighter.