Forem: Calvin Ochieng'

Learning To Program: 5 Brilliant Steps To Succeed

Calvin Ochieng' — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 09:18:23 +0000

1. Select a programming language to focus on.

The choice of a programming language should depend on your interest and what you want to build after you’re done learning. There are many programming languages probably tens of thousands—and you definitely can’t learn all of them at once.

For example, we have JavaScript, HTML, CSS, C, C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, Python, Rust, FORTRAN, Julia, COBOL, and many, many more.

Each programming language has its strengths and weaknesses, making them suited for different purposes in the field of programming. Here are some of the applications and the programming languages mostly used to create them.

a. Desktop applications mostly use C++ and C,

b. We have C, C#, and C++ for video games.

c. Operating system programs use C, C++, Rust, and Python.

d. Mobile apps: Android apps are written in Kotlin or Java, while iOS apps are written in C#.

e. Web development, which is divided into back-end and front-end components, can employ a variety of languages, including Python (Django), PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

With this in mind, now choose the one that is right for you, stick with it, and learn it till you’re a pro.

2. Create projects while learning to program.

After you have chosen the programming language you want to learn, don’t hesitate to start working on projects. If you’re learning game development, then start creating simple games immediately. If you’re doing web development, then start creating simple web pages. The list goes on.

Remember, putting into practice what you’ve learned is the key. It makes everything you’ve learned stick. And the best part is, you can always use these projects in your resume` thus giving you a competitive advantage in the job search.

3. Learn Git in the Process

Git is a free, open-source, and incredibly powerful distributed version control system that can handle small to large projects in a fast and efficient way. It’s an amazing resource for software developers, web designers, and anyone else who needs to keep track of their work. The reason I added this here is that, at some point, you will need some way of keeping track of your code changes. This is where you will use this technology to help you organize and manage the changes in your code.

*Here is why you need to learn Git.
*
a. It’s a powerful tool that can help you stay organized, manage changes in your code, and keep everyone on your team up to date.

b. It’s also a great way to share your code with other developers and back it up safely.

c. It can help you revert to a previous version of your code in case there are some errors in the latest push.

d. It is a requirement for any job placement.

As a programmer, learning how to use Git is a great way to enhance your skills and open up new opportunities. Plus, it is a requirement for every coding job opening out there; you can never get a job if you don’t understand Git.

So this being said, if you’re interested in learning more about version control, our Git tutorial is a great resource. There are other resources, like reading the git docs, on GitHub.

4. Become a member of a coding community.

When you’re learning to program, you need to join a thriving community of passionate learners who are eager to share their knowledge and help each other. These communities are there to help you on your journey, to answer all your questions, and to guide you whenever you get stuck. There are several communities on various platforms with the same goal that mostly work the same way. When you join, you can ask a question or search for answers to your questions among the plenty of questions and answers that are already there.

Here are some of the platforms where these communities can be found:

a. Stackoverflow: It’s generally a platform where people post coding questions and others who have knowledge about it can give the answers for you to choose from.

b. Quora: It’s similar to Stack Overflow in that it allows you to write long-form articles about your journey. This platform contains comprehensive tutorials on any topic, from programming to marketing, it is not limited to programming.

c. Reddit: is one of my favorites; here, you can subscribe to a subreddit dedicated to specific programming languages. From here, you will find pros who will guide you on your journey.

d. There are so many platforms out there; others are Hackernoon, Discord, Tumblr, and more.

In these communities, you will form connections with other coders and become a mentor to those who are just starting out. Remember, sharing what you’ve learned helps you understand the concept even better.

5. Practice Constantly

As the old saying goes, “practice makes perfect,” and that’s especially true when it comes to learning to program. To be able to understand a programming language, you need to practice coding in it! Even if you’re just starting out, coding in your target language can help you improve your learning process. Remember that programming languages evolve pretty quickly, and you have to always be on your toes and keep track of the changes that come every now and then.

If you want to stay relevant in this field, you have to keep track of the programming language. And with regular practice and dedication, you’ll be able to perfect your skills.

Bonus: Contribute by writing tutorials on what you’ve learned. Writing tutorials is a great way to help others while also expanding your knowledge of the programming language.

Like I said earlier, sharing makes you learn even more. When you’re learning, make it a habit to give back to the people who are still starting out.

Here is how you can give back to the community.
a. Write a tutorial about the concept you now understand. To you, it may seem simple, but to someone just starting out, it can help a lot. You can post your tutorials on Quora, Reddit, or Tumblr, or you can create a video and post it on YouTube.

b. Answer programming questions on platforms like Stack Overflow; this will earn you a lot of respect from the community as you get more badges for answering questions. But don’t do it for the badges; do it to help.

c. Create a programming blog and consistently write about the things you do, your journey, and what you’ve learned so far and share it with your fans.

Besides the respect you get, the best part is that you can always make money from the content you post on Quora, YouTube, and your blog. You can also include them on your resume and stand out among your peers
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As a Coder What Do You Do When Everybody Doesn't Believe in You Anymore?

Calvin Ochieng' — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:47:36 +0000

What do you do when everybody doesn't believe in you anymore, alone, depressed, and losing hope? But when what you believe is so strong and you know you can make it.

I have been coding for three years now and created several projects, some wasted my money, and some wasted my time.

I don't know why I can't quit despite these upsets and setbacks. I keep going burning midnight candles daily from project to project

I have always wanted to create and see results on the spot, that's why I love to code so much and appreciate the challenges of coding. My best night's sleep is when I go to bed knowing that I solved a problem with code. And even if don't solve it then, I always know that the next morning I will have the answer, that's me.

Three years on, I don't have a job as a software engineer, and I haven't built that million dollars app yet. I'm stuck working at a job I don't like that gives me just enough to move from one month to the next.

Sometimes I sob under my pillar in the morning before I set my foot out of bed, asking myself what's wrong with me, and why I have to go through this. Why can't I make it, why haven't I made it? It's sad sometimes

Looking at the history books, it's clear that no one has ever made it easy. The most successful are the ones who have gone through the most and suffered the most setbacks and failures. This is what keeps me going, that's why I haven't given up or lost hope, but the most important thing is that I believe that I will make it. I know I will make it.

So no matter what I face every now and then, when they mock me for my failed attempts, I tap myself on my back and telling myself that "those failures were just the best lessons learned, they were the best advice no one could ever give me" And I smile at them, we laugh together and move on.

As long as I live I will always keep trying, I'm currently working on this website called Yaahpy, an image-sharing website for sharing memes. I have been working on it for a while now it's out now, we've gained some users and the good news is that Adsense has accepted the website and it will start showing ads soon, I'm yet to set them up.

Please if you get time, kindly go and check it out. I hope you enjoy it. https://yaahpy.com/ or just search for the term yaahpy it may appear as the first result.

For dreamers like me trying to figure things out, I know I'm not in a position to advise you, but let's keep grinding and someday we're gonna get there. Thank you for your time.

I was Reported to CRB, Five Years On I’m Free Records Deleted

Calvin Ochieng' — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 10:05:12 +0000

It's been five years since Tala reported me to CRB despite paying them back in full, thank God I got a message this morning from CRB informing me that my information has been cleared. It was the happiest moment this morning.

Hey, before you judge me please hear my side of the story first.

Five years ago I was a student at JKUAT in my second year of study. As you know life is not easy there for comrades, it's even tougher if you're depending on your parents for everything. But that was me, I was also trying to find ways to make money online. So I met this guy who told me that I could create a blog and start creating content and that could make me money easily and fast.

So I did some research on how to do this, and I quickly found out that it wasn’t free to start a blog as I was led to believe unlike in Opera News. You have to pay for hosting, the domain name, and even for advertisement and SEO stuff.

I got confused, I did not know what to do, I checked around on where I could get money online for free but I found none. So one day I decided that I was going to lie to my Dad to send me some cash for a school project and tour, but I realized this wasn't a good idea. I later lied to get the money anyway but I’ll come to that later.

After some time, I was almost giving up, I went to that buddy of mine who introduced me to the blogging stuff and I asked how he did it but, he didn't have the answer, unfortunately. This made me even more confused.

Angry and ready to drop it all until I have enough money, he reached out and told me that if I needed that cash so bad, I should try out Tala. He gave me some details, he told me how easy it was to get accepted and how you could grow.

I didn’t hesitate to download the app and install it. The app was easy to set up and use, just some details and there you go I got a message on my phone I had received 500/=.

I was so happy but I was to pay it back in two weeks that was not a problem, because by then I was going to get some cash from home.

My experience was good despite the interests, I was satisfied I was able to buy the domain and host my first website. Which was called LinkSpot Hub. Little did I know that this was not going to get me the cash as fast as I had projected. I missed the repayment time and that was it.

Missed repayment time, I tried to talk to them but they didn't listen, the worse part was that I was so broke and my Dad had been fired so it was even hard at home too.

After a while, I finally paid them back in full but it was too late they had already reported me to the CRB guys. I tried to talk to them to remove me since they are the ones who put me there in the first place. I didn’t hear from them again they blacklisted me. I was not able to borrow from them again.

Just in case you’re wondering where I got the cash, I lied to my Dad. One of the shellfish things I ever did to him when he didn’t even have a job. I don’t want to go further, I did this because I was desperate, I heard being reported to CRB was shameful and reduces your credit score to zero, and I didn’t want that.

Five years later, I got a message that I was cleared from CRB I was so happy. I did not want to pay to clear myself from CRB because I felt it was very unfair for them to have done that to me.

Is it unfair for them to drop you to CRB soon as you miss repayment time? Let me know in the comment sections below.

Hey thank you for your time before you go please check my latest memes on Yaahpy, I hope you found this useful, please share it with your homies. Otherwise, have a good one peace ✌️.

Sad Reality And Boring State of Social Media

Calvin Ochieng' — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 17:38:59 +0000

I’m tired of the same way these social media are designed, they haven't changed ever since Friendster was created. We need something new. We've had the same way of interacting online ever since the internet was born. It has always been, sign-up, follow, get followed in name of the connection. Post, like, share, comment, repeat, that's it, in the name of interacting. This has put many people under pressure to get attention, pressure to be seen, and go viral.

Everybody wants to be famous, and be recognized nowadays, they want many followers, many likes, and many views, and they don't even care about one on one interactions anymore. Which often leads to depression. I'm not saying that it's bad to be recognized or to be famous or so. But it should come naturally, we need to work for it and it should be real with true people behind you I mean people who care about you, not people who follow you just because you followed them, as in following for follow.

Social media has taken over our lives and to make it worse they have given us the bots aka artificial intelligence to control us now. It is so sad.

Artificial intelligence is now the ‘god’ fancied us ‘recommendation engine’. It's the one that dictates what we see; everything we’re shown is theirs to decide. This is a big problem though, we as human beings changes every day, today we like this, tomorrow we like that, based on our emotions. That's our nature, right? Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, doesn’t have any emotions hence, it can’t understand what we truly need or want. So, no matter how hard these social media try to use them to recommend content to us, they have failed miserably.

Jesus, they even control who we follow; those whom they think are "better suited to be our friends". It's so sad

I know you would say No! But you know deep down they have failed us terribly. Look, how many people are depressed or have anxiety or have just committed suicide just because of these recommendations from ‘monster’ bots called social media? They aim to keep you hooked they don't care what they feed you it doesn’t matter whether it's hate speech or depressing content.

If you're sad they'll feed you even more sadness, if you’re lonely they'll feed you even more lonesomeness and if you like horror they’ll feed you even more horror and the list goes on and on. If you like the flashy lifestyle they’ll keep on shoving them down your throat, mostly promoting fake lifestyles contents.

I want to say well, we've had this for a long time it has worked but we need something new. We need social websites to be natural, with no algorithms, and no need to follow or to be followed. The follow should change to fan-based, you don't need many people to follow you, you only need a few people to be your true fans. That is those who interact with you regularly as is in real life.

You don’t need many people to be fulfilled in life, only keep those who are always with you, there for you whenever you need them and if they stop interacting with you well, you know what happens.

The contents should be chronological and only based on a relationship between the post you're reading or interacting with right then when you go back to the home page it's chronological.

We need to let artificial intelligence help us interact but it should not dictate how we interact, what we interact with, or who we interact with, it should help to make the internet safe, and it should help us do translations, and image recognition to make the apps even more enjoyable.

Websites are popping up lately, the likes of Bereal and Yaahpy are trying but they aren't there yet, we need something that will always bring us together, make us happier and bring in true connections. I hope someday we will be able to have something like that. Let's be free.

Thank you for your time I appreciate you. I hope you enjoyed reading this let me know what you think in the comment section below. Have a good one peace ✌️.

FLUTTER FOR BEGINNERS TUTORIAL LEARN HOW TO INSTALL AND SET UP

Calvin Ochieng' — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 10:37:54 +0000

What is Flutter

Flutter is UI toolkit developed by Google for use to create multi-platform apps, that means that you can use flutter to develop applications that run on both iOS and Android with the same codebase, Desktop, and Web as well.

Flutter uses Dart programming language, which is powerful hence making the apps developed by Flutter to be blazing fast.

It is also the default SDK for developing apps for the upcoming Googles Fuschia Os which will be capable of running on all major platform from embed system to phones to computers.

Downloading and Installing Flutter

Before installing flutter ensure you have Android Studio installed and virtual devices installed and set up.

We are going to download the recommended package depending on our system from the Flutter official website. Get the downloaded zip file then create a folder, extract the zip into the folder.

Example here for Ubuntu user, “mkdr” creates the folder in which you will extract and install the flutter package,

$ mkdr fldev

After running that, now move to the created folder as shown below

$ cd fldev

After locating into the folder, its time now to extract the zip file we downloaded from flutter website into the folder as shown below…Remember the part {file_verion_name} is the name of the file you downloaded so don’t use the one below directly.

$ tar xf ~/Downloads/{file_verion_name}.tar.xz

Finally add flutter tools to your path, note that this will make flutter available on the current terminal only.

$ export PATH="$PATH:fldev/flutter/bin"

Flutter Development Environment Setup

We are almost done, now let us run flutter doctor and finish installing. also as show below…

$ flutter doctor

This will check your system for dependencies that are essential for flutter app development. With that checked, if everything is ticked OK then its time to finish up by finally updating our path so that we can run flutter everywhere in our system by running this.

Running this opens up the system file called .bashrc, it sometimes differs from system to system, so running this will make the file editable and make some few changes to it

$ nano $HOME/.bashrc

Once the file is open, copy-paste or just type it in, it is easier when you type it in, the following to the file. Remember to replace the {USER_NAME} part with your system user name for it to work.

export PATH="$PATH:/home/{USER_NAME}/fldev/flutter/bin"

After adding that into the file, now the click CTR+O to save and the CTR+X to exit the editor, then finish up by running the following into the terminal

$ echo PATH

All done, here is the sweat part, we can now create our first android application, by running the following. This will create our app, get and set up all the required packages and dependencies.

$ flutter create newapp

Move into the directory you have the app in then run the following

$ cd newapp

Running your first flutter app
After you located to the newapp folder, we can now run our first app by running the following in the terminal.

$ flutter run

Doing this will check if there is any device connected so ensure your device is connected or your virtual is running for the process to complete without error.

Chose your Flutter editor

With all that set you can now choose your favorite editor whereby you will develop and debug your applications. I personally prefer Visual Studio Code because it provides the best experience during development and debugging and its the lightest editor you can use to develop flutter apps unlike other once like Visual Studio, Android Studio or IntelliJ IDEA.

With Visual Studio Code, you only need Flutter and Dart plugins which you add and boom you are set to go, no hustle.

Conclusion

So in this post, I took you through downloading extracting installing and setting development environment, then we created and ran our first app.

Thank you for your time.

Happy Coding.