The Journey To My Software Development Career
My name is Matheus Tangeni Shikomba mostly known by my second name ‘Tangeni’ which simply means `praise`. I was born in a small village called Othimbika Village in northern Namibia. I however grew up in the small town of Luderitz in Southern Namibia. My migration from one end of the country to the other was caused by the search for a better education. I will not get into detail with regards to my education as this article's intention is purely to aimed at writing about how I ended up in the field of Software Development or Computing.
My first encounter with the existence of this thing called Software Development / Software Engineering did not come at an early age as for some people but in my case, it happened between 2011–2012 when I was merely 17 years old, yeah I was very old compared to a kid in the western world. This was during the time I got my first official smartphone from my parents after I had passed 10th grade successfully. Yeah, it was a personal success for me, the hard work has paid off with a brand new smartphone, a Nokia E5. Ag Tangos It was just a Nokia E5! I know but the Nokia E-Series was the real deal of its time, even though it was around this time when Samsung and it's now popular Android Smartphone were becoming popular I still loved my Nokia E5 and my friends loved it too.
I have always had a curious mind since childhood, which has however made me quite different from my peers in different aspects of life. It is through my Nokia E5 that I was able to test and penetrate my curiosity about the inner workings of the software. I was able to download new software applications into my Nokia E5 and the absolute beauty of this device was that it gave you access to browse through all the files that make up this Software. But what made me even more curious was the fact that I could not open these files to see what was inside.
My parents had acquired a Computer some months back then, it was not the best looking or the most expensive computer one could come across, but yes it was a 512 MB RAM Computer with 256 GB of storage memory. Yes, that was how small in terms of performance capability it was. Often I would open up this computer just to learn about the inner workings and architecture of a computer. Not long enough fast forward to the year 2013 I was in matric and I was motivated more than ever, I wanted to study Computer Science after giving up on my long lasted career path in Aircraft Engineering.
Fast forward a few months later I applied for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at the University of Namibia fortunate enough I was admitted. Never did I expect that my years of pursuing this qualification would not be an easy path, but now that I am heading towards the end of my studies I never looked back It was a fun and tough journey. However, all that matters is the amount of knowledge I’ve gained and the network I’ve built over the years.
I am now a professional Software Engineer, who has built quite a number of websites and software applications, ranging from Laravel, and Firebase to Angular applications. I am also fascinated by Entrepreneurship and Data Science, I am currently pursuing a thesis in the field of Natural Language Processing using Twitter data.
You can keep in touch with me:
LinkedIn: Matheus Shikomba
