Woes of a Nigerian Self-taught Dev.
Right now, things are especially tough. Unusually tough might be a better term. To be honest, I am equally tired of being frustrated. I don’t think there’s any feeling that can replace it. Even with that, I am still hopeful that I can make something out of it. See, because of my troubles, my writing is consistent. What am I even talking about? Let’s explore that.
The fact of the matter is: everything is unusually difficult for the average Nigerian. The government works actively to ensure they stifle your goals and aspirations — well, this might sound like I have a tinfoil hat on but it’s true. They might not do it intentionally but the ineptitude of the government has made the environment unfavourable.
Wait a bit, that’s not even the totality of my woes. I have been able to find ways around the erratic power supply and the higher data prices — sheesh they are so high — but what’s really grinding my gears is how slow my PC is.
Thing is, I’m not complaining, wait, I am. For one thing, I acknowledge that even having a personal computer is a massive privilege and I don’t deny that. It’s opened up opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise have been available but I can still complain.
My computer is 6years old and it can’t run most dev environment unless I need to do basic HTML and CSS in sublime. I now have to result to online IDEs — which are amazing — but even with that, I can’t open a Figma design file while just ONE, ONE other tab is open. It’s 100% frustrating. Everything freezes up; the cursor stops moving; and I have to force restart, every single time. Most times, I feel like pulling my hair out.
I can access medium and Twitter but I can’t do dev stuff. I really want to improve my skills by making projects but right now, conditions are really limiting.
Is that happening on Windows you ask? Why not try Linux you ask? I have tried Linux and we are about to get to that.
At the start of Last year, I decided to give Linux a spin because of my old hardware — I didn’t want to make any excuses — and for the most part, it was great. The terminal was a massive improvement over Windows PowerShell and it felt like new life had been breathed into my system. The usual limitations of just 4–5 tabs in chrome still occurred but it was alright for the most part, till when the Power situation decided to one day ruin my life.
This is what happened. Xubuntu had been showing updates notifications for a while, so I decided to finally update. I clicked the button and off it went. Around the time of installation, I completely forgot about the power schedule and to my dismay, the power went out. After that, I couldn’t boot back into Ubuntu and the errors were just so complicated I wasn’t able to figure them out. Right then, I wanted to just throw in the towel. I did give up. For days, I left the computer and just sulked.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay that way for so long because I had dreams. I have dreams and it required me to get up, struggle and struggle. I booted to windows which thank Goodness was still there, updated the system, installed edge — cause chrome and firefox were hogging the little ram I had — and things seemed to be working. Until the fire Nation attacked.
Fast forward to today; I can’t code for longer because of these present constraints. I even have a project I volunteered to build but can’t complete at the moment. It’s a pretty sad situation. The only thing left to do is to write about these woes and hope, soon, something changes for the better.
Thanks for reading. I decided to take some steps and create a fundraiser if you wanna help me out. Here’s the link to it if you’d like to donate, thank you very much. Help Kenny’s journey in becoming a Software Developer — Gifter
