Unveiling My Bootcamp Experience

She Code Africa (SCA for short) is a non-profit organisation that aims to empower women and girld in Africa with Tech. It is a wonderful initiative that prioritises community, technical growth, visibility and leadership, and aims to imbue these values into it's members too.

SCA Asaba is one of the many chapters of she code africa, and this bootcamp is one of the many initiatives by SCA to impact tech skills onto women and girls worlwide.

About the Bootcamp

The SCA Asaba bootcamp 2.0 was a 1 month long bootcamp that offered 3 various learning tracks as follows

• social media management

• content creation

• technical writing

I was enrolled in the Technical writing track and here's a little peek into how the bootcamp went

Bootcamp Reflections

We had a schedule of three 2-hour classes per week. Our instructors, Aishat Muhammed and Ogechukwu Aina were very accommodating with regards to answering our various questions and reviewing our work.

We've gone through various essential concepts and important aspects of Technical writing to help us level up our technical writing skills.

I not only got very specific feedback on each of my article submissions, but also various resources to help improve my writing and aid the writing process in general.

Weekly Milestones

In the first week, we learned about the basics of technical writing, the definition, types, and importance of writing good articles and other written content.

This was wonderful because a lot of people jump into technical writing without really knowing its importance and often get confused about what the role of a technical writer entails.

After a while, we were asked to write our own article on a product of our choice. I chose to write about Git and Github as those are important concepts in open source, which is a topic I have a large interest in.

Apart from this, we've been given other tasks to test our attentiveness to the classes and to help us grow as writers.

Benefits

Apart from the mentorship opportunity and the thrill of learning with a community, we were introduced to tons of resources by our mentors to aid in our technical writing journey.

We were introduced to writing tools, paraphrasing tools, plagiarism checkers, and a couple of other tools to help us maximise the quality of our content.

Struggles

The bootcamp tries to accommodate all members' needs greatly hence we only had classes on weekends, Friday - Sundays.

Despite this, I had to shuffle the classes and tasks with my upcoming exams so even my weekends were packed.

I was still able to attend a lot of the classes regardless and resorted to going through the presentation slides shared with us after the class to cover up for the missed sessions, while also doing my best to submit the assignments given.

The decision to persevere through the bootcamp and not give up along the way was definitely one of the best I've made as it showed just how much I could get myself to achieve even when it didn't seem possible.

Conclusion

The bootcamp has been a wonderful experience and has had a huge impact on my journey of becoming a professional technical writer. I got to interact with various wonderful people and have gained a lot more than just technical writing skills in the process.

✌🏾