At some point in my life, I became passionate about Cloud and DevOps Engineering and decided to make a career out of it after trying my hands at Frontend, Backend, and Cybersecurity.
She Code Africa (SCA) Cloud School is a cohort-style, Bootcamp program specifically targeted at ladies across Africa, looking to kick off or switch careers into the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) field, organized by She Code Africa (a registered non-profit organization aimed at empowering young girls and women across Africa with technical and soft skills needed to match or scale their careers in STEM) in partnership with Deimos.
I joined the SCA Community while trying to gain experience in front-end development, and I learned about Cloud School via the community and LinkedIn. I applied for the boot camp with high hopes and also had the opportunity to attend a Twitter space that talked about the program (and also we were told to learn how to work with technologies like Docker and Kubernetes) and also got to connect with ladies from past cohorts.
After a daily refresh of my emails for weeks, I finally got a mail saying I passed the first stage of the selection process, with instructions for the second stage (which was to record a video of myself talking about my journey, how the program will help in my journey, and why I am a good fit for the program); I finally passed both stages, and I was overjoyed.
The successful 50 ladies had an onboarding call where we were briefed on how the whole program would be and also split into 2 classes (Ruby and Emerald) before the program commenced.
Start of Cloud School: The program started with introductions to our facilitators and also a general introduction to cloud computing, (My facilitator was really awesome because she made the class interactive.) As someone who is a big fan of AWS, I started losing interest in the program because the main cloud provider taught in cloud school was Azure (before cloud school, I was never an Azure fan, but thanks to cloud school and my facilitator, I have a special relationship with Microsoft Azure).
Some of the projects I worked on in SCA cloud school are
During the program, we also had to do some evaluation to test our progress and complete a final project.
Final Project: We had one week to work on our project, which was either on:
Containerizing an application and deploying it on Kubernetes.
Deploying an application to Azure using web app service and SQL.
I went for the Docker and Kubernetes project and wrote a detailed article because it was more interesting and challenging (I encountered some errors that halted my progress, and I almost didn't submit my project).
What I gained from SCA cloud school
Through the SCA Cloud School, I gained:
Knowledge of Azure; got conversant with various Azure services by working on hands-on projects.
Knowledge of Microservices, containerization, and Container orchestration, which is a must for a DevOps engineer.
How to share my learning by constantly writing articles.
Conclusion
I would like to thank the founder of She Code Africa, Ada Nduka Oyom and the entire team for coming up with this initiative, My facilitators, Oluwadamilola Aremu, and Chiamaka Obitube for their effort and patience, and also the Ruby class ladies.
I highly recommend this program for cloud computing beginners and intermediates who would like to learn with peers.
I look forward to getting the internship opportunity with Deimos, as this will be a great plus in my career.
Thank you for reading, Feel free to connect with me on Twitter, Linkedin, and GitHub
Weeks later, I got the news that I was among the top 8 from the BootCamp, had my interview, and got the Deimos Site Reliability Engineer internship role. I'm excited to explore this opportunity, and Deimos has a very lovely work culture and environment.
