I finished school and the next step for me was to fully go into tech. I was looking for internship training that will keep me busy and also improve my tech skills. While I was having a conversation with a friend one day he said that he was learning C programming at ALX and he is loving it and he told me to check it out. I made my research and decided to go for it since I was looking for a learning program.

I applied for it and got my “CONGRATULATIONS YOU MADE IT” mail from them and I was overjoyed and said to myself “THIS JOURNEY WILL TAKE ME PLACES”. Every day after I got the mail, alx sent me emails helping me understand what the program is about and also set up the alx intranet dashboard.

It’s the first month of the training and we are having two weeks of onboarding sessions. We had live sessions on youtube. We were told that alx is for 12 months and it requires 70 hours of our time a week and 10 hours a day. Honestly, I didn’t see that coming. I decided to give it a try since I didn’t have anything like school holding me down.

We were introduced to slack a messaging app for better communication. The alx intranet is where we could get our tasks for the day and submit them. It has a checker that will help you check your task if it’s right or wrong before moving to the next task. Tasks for the onboarding were basically to improve one's mindset and conquer imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is an internal experience of believing that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be as if you are a fraud. They also talked about the peer learning days which is the best day you wouldn’t want to miss. It’s the day you and other peers come together and talk about the difficulties faced during the tasks.

After the onboarding weeks, Tools to help us get started were introduced. Such as (Git, vi, emac).

1. Vi(visual editor) is an editor that comes with UNIX OPS. Using vi, we can edit, create and read files.
2. Emacs is an editor for POSIX ops available on Linux, mac, windows, and more. You can read, edit and create files.
3. Git is a tool used for tracking changes in a computer file. It allows multiple developers to work together. It works along with GitHub. GitHub is a website where you can hist your project. You do not need GitHub to use it, but you cannot use GitHub without using git.

It’s the last week of the month! I couldn’t imagine that I will still be in this training by now. It was challenging and the best for me career-wise but not mentally and physically. At this point of time in the training, I had already made enough friends that I could rant to and they would understand me because they are also in the training with me. The last week's task was about SHELL. Shell is a program that takes commands from the keyboard and gives them to the ops to perform. Sounds cool. Having to work in my terminal is timesaving I can move files to folders, delete, rename, copy files, and many more in less than 20sec. It’s easier to work with and I love it. That's basically about the first month. I look forward to the next month of ALX. I will be coming back to update y’all every month on how it’s going in the training. Thank you.

ALX can be draining when you decide to work alone. You teach yourself and teach others to improve more. I would advise anyone who wants to be a software engineer should check out ALX.