I believe you must have heard the quote “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” by Joseph Kennedy before; well, that quote was my major mantra all through my second semester in Alt-School. Started second semester around June i guess, the first month of the second semester started with us being introduced to the cloud, then we went into linux; we practically went deep into it, commands in linux, process management, creation of users and all of that.

Then the second month we went into Version control (git), SystemD, bash scripting, wrote my first ever Bash script during this period.

Third month had us learning Ansible and Networking. The semester ended with us being asked to deploy a Laravel app on a server and then linking it to any domain of our choice.

This period was actually one of the toughest phase of my tech journey so far, it was so so chaotic, i was moving from one error to another. it was crazy to the extent that, you know when you’re about to do something and you are automatically expecting errors already before even doing, i write a line of code and before i run it , i am already thinking in my head…which error am i gonna get this time around, lo and behold, i kid you not, a big error is definitely popping up on my screen.

Exam came, little did i realize the “shege” i was seeing during the semester was nothing compared to what i was going to face in my exams. 😂

The exam was literally us doing the same thing we did in the mini project, but this time with a little modification, we had to deploy the laravel app on another server using an ansible playbook written on an host machine.

A quick digression, i am presently doing my internship at a Federal medical facility in Lagos, its a compulsory one year program medical graduates are meant to undergo before they can get their permanent license. So all along, i have been combining Alt-school Africa with my internship.

We are all entitled to a month paid leave, luckily for me, my second semester exams fell within that period, so i kind of had a lot of time at my disposal.

I was averaging 12-14 hours on a daily basis on my laptop for close to three weeks in the build up to the exam deadline and i really wish i am capping right now. Was having multiple google meet sessions with fellow Alt-schoolers, because collaboration was actually allowed but we aren’t allowed to cheat.

There was a particular I remember vividly right now, we did one google meet from around 7:00pm till 4:00am the next day, i know it might be hard to believe. i started with them, got tired, left around to twelve. Told a friend that we were in the google meet together that i was tired already and had to leave, he was the one later teling me the next day they did the google meet session till 4:00am… According to the second exam instructions, we are meant to secure the domain with SSL and we also had to test our endpoint to make sure it was working, after deploying my app initially, the Laravel was displaying but my endpoint wasn't showing and my domain wasn't secured. and i was actually legit SCARED to go touch anything in my playbook, i knew what i went through to even get the Laravel to Display in the first place, imagine i touch it, and everything scatters😩, “Wahala ma wa, olopa de ma ko everybody.” Eventually tweaked here and there and yeah it was later sorted.

Probably the fact that i didn't come from a technical background made it extra difficult for me, but looking back at it now, it was a great learning experience for me and i am glad i went through it.

My result for the second semester dropped like two weeks ago and i had 70%... the cut off mark for this semester was also pegged at 65%.

As i write this, i already have contents on my LMS for the new semester. I gotta go now, i aint playing with nobody this semester!!!😂✌🏽