Seeking for Career Opportunities

11 years ago, 13 year old Nasah landed her first IT job as the secretary in charge of her dad’s documentation where she did the typing, printing, photocopying, spiral binding and lamination of documents. Luckily, after her dad’s former employee resigned she was given the opportunity, to play with machines which helped her a lot when she was taught computer sciences in secondary school. Being a developer a couple of years later opened my eyes to the competition involved in landing a real job in this field. After my Outreachy internship at GNOME, I am looking forward to getting more paid internships, remote jobs and even scholarships that will help me pay for a Masters degree in Data Science .

The field of software development is one with lots of pressure. Dealing with power outages, poor internet connectivity, strikes and lock downs in my country (Cameroon) has taught me how to be resilient even under very harsh conditions. This has made me confident of the fact that I can cope with working in other environments which have their own challenges and also collaborating in teams of diverse individuals as the Outreachy internship and constant check-ins with other interns and alums have taught me. I code in JavaScript(Angular, HTML and CSS) and will be very excited to work on developer tools for this language.My interest in developer tools is powered by the fact that developers will keep developing solutions and will keep needing tools to facilitate the process. If developer tools keep improving(improvement in the user experience), it will be easier to develop software solutions, more people will join the field of software development hence more solutions will come up to solve the problems we face in our day-to-day lives making the world a better place to live in. Nonetheless, I am open to gaining skills in other languages used for back-end web development such as Java and Node.js to help me become a well-rounded full stack developer.

In 2020 I worked on a Library Management System built with vanilla JavaScript, HTML and CSS (please check the repository for more details https://github.com/Nasah-Kuma/NG-Library). This was one of the first projects I worked on as an attempt to master JavaScript (among a team of four friends). The first challenge I encountered throughout this process was sharing my code with the other team members collaboratively. There were so many times my work was lost because of the challenges faced while resolving merge conflicts. If I learnt something from this experience, it was how to work with and communicate my challenges to other team members.

From August 2019 – November 2019 I was involved in a training program that helped me gain skills in Angular development. I was also appointed the team lead for the front-end team of 4 members helping me to improve on my communication and team coordination skills. At the end of this project, we built a product catalog application which helps you perform the CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on products (https://github.com/Nasah-Kuma/ProductCatalog). This experience was very exciting because I had to deal with so much pressure since something happened to our repository and we lost most of the code few days to the deadline. Due to the determination of our team, we were able to get things working before the presentation. All these experiences were steps that led me to where I am today. In my opinion, the journey is just beginning and I know the world is pregnant with opportunities. I am prepared for the challenges that lie ahead and will gladly welcome them as stepping stones. My Outreachy internship has not only taught me that I can do better but has exposed me to best practices of both coding and communication in the free software world.

In addition to all these, I am a holder of a Bachelor in Engineering in Computer Engineering from the University of Buea Cameroon, can express myself fluently in English language and understand French slightly above the intermediate level. The development of software solutions has changed the world. All my life, I’ve wished to be part of this change.