How studying at Openclassrooms shaped my life as a Software Developer

Hi, I'm Fotie: A software engineer, graduate from the African institute of computer sciences, and an Alum from Openclassrooms. I initially did not have a science background. However, I have always been intrigued by what one could do with tech. Being a young student in tech I was always curious and wanted to know more. I had the will, but not enough resources to improve my skill. I strongly believed what I had been given at university wasn't enough. And I am a person who's always out for more. In 2019 I won a scholarship from Facebook Developer circles to study at Openclassrooms.

I wish I could narrate how remarkable my studies at Openclassrooms have been. Today I'm happy to share with the community that I finished my Front-End Developer career path at OpenClassrooms and I can say I'm thrilled by how much I've learned.

When I joined OpenClassrooms, I was just another excited tech enthusiast out there who wanted to learn something new. In this article, I will share my personal opinion about OpenClassrooms and if it's worth it for anyone who wants to take a path at OpenClassrooms.

Before taking the Front-end developer path at OpenClassrooms, I only had a basic knowledge of analysis, programming with algorithms, and data structures as I was taking my undergraduate degree in computer software engineering at the time. Now you must be wondering what concretely I learned at Openclassrooms since I already was doing an undergraduate program in software engineering. Well, the degree I was taking gave me nothing much but theory, and when I mean theory, I mean a lot of it. I actually knew more theory than practice. I didn't have the feeling of getting my hands dirty by working on a project till completion. This is something I couldn't get at school. At OpenClassrooms I had to work on concrete projects, which was just what I needed to foster my skills and get ready for the job market. These projects forced me to develop skills from writing cool full object-oriented javascript code to using google maps API which was just soo much fun. Something I had never done before. well, I had indeed worked on a couple of personal projects before, but I never went too deep into concepts. I learned the basics and the complex stuff. At some point, I had the feeling I would not be able to finish the program in time, given that I had just a year of scholarship from the Facebook Developer Circles program. But thanks to the motivation of my student success manager from OpenClassrooms and my mentor, I could get back on track and keep working. I personally think getting seasonal emails from OpenClassrooms was just a motivational factor for me to keep pushing.

As of today, I believe all the technical stuff I learned in tech aside from my personal research at university is thanks to OpenClassrooms. I thank OpenClassrooms for giving me the skill set and Facebook for giving me a great opportunity like this one.

Some of the awesome projects I built at openclassrooms can be seen on my Github(github.com/FotieMConstant) or portfolio(fotiemconstant.github.io)

PS: This article has nothing to do with advertising or I was in no way paid to write this, simply sharing my experience studying at Openclassrooms.

Initially published at fotie.hashnode.dev