A QUICK INTRODUCTION

The written word was one of my first loves, my first childhood friend, my first best friend.

Growing up in Cameroon, Africa, in the pre-internet age of the ‘90s, there were few sources of entertainment available. No cinemas, no TV (my parents didn’t get one till I was in my late teens), no screens of any kind.

Novels became my main source of entertainment. And novels in turn introduced me to the vast, limitless, and fun universe of reading where I discovered other entertaining material as well as learning resources: newspaper articles, textbooks, just to name a few. I came to cherish books in general as a limitless source of entertainment and knowledge.

Reading novels allowed me to travel in my mind to distant lands and meet people of various cultures.

Reading textbooks got me through high school and university.

BEFORE TECH

Out of High School

I went to college and majored in BioChem, found out there wasn’t much in terms of job opportunities so I made a switch.

Career in translation

As they say, sometimes an obstacle is a blessing in disguise. The lack of job prospects in the BioChem field helped open my mind to other possibilities and I ended up pivoting into interpretation and translation because it fit in with my love for reading.

Reading articles and textbooks as part of my translation training taught me the art of using words to make knowledge accessible to readers of various levels of expertise.

Being an interpreter and translator was not only rewarding but also taught me to appreciate the power of words to bridge communication gaps.

GETTING INTO TECH

Fast forward a “few” years later, I moved to Brazil and my interpretation career effectively stalled due to the lack of demand for French to English interpreters, in comes the second pivot, this time into tech. So I traded in my translator’s pen and paper for Visual Studio Code’s IDE (an Integrated Development Editor, a software program developers use to write and edit their code ).

I needed something as challenging and fast-paced as my previous career in interpretation and translation and I found that software engineering gave me that rush and sense of accomplishment I had grown accustomed to.

The indescribable feeling of achievement that comes when you feel like you have spent the last few days or weeks hitting against a brick wall in the form of a coding challenge and finally finding an article or blog post that unblocks it in an instant, is hard to match.

My WHY

As I began my tech journey, I relied heavily on technical articles and blogs to strengthen my grasp of complex technical concepts like loops, algorithms, and Big O notation. They have helped me to solve coding challenges, taught me to think through problems in a step-by-step manner, and motivated me to keep going with my studies.

I am indebted to the authors of these resources and would like to give back.

I want to share what I am learning and hopefully help get someone unstuck like I was.

Above all, I want to learn to explain complex programming concepts in simple ways that anyone can understand regardless of their technical background.

In short, I just want to help others grow in the tech world through my writing.

Thanks for taking the time to read about my journey into technical writing.

Aurelie Fomum, MERN stack software engineer.