Hi, am Gilbert Andanje, a Mechatronics Engineering student at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Nairobi, Kenya. I am also the founder of RoboKid a company that looks to impart fundamentals of tech in kids through experiential learning by tinkering with interactive robots built in class.
Growing up I have been many things but a computer enthusiast. I once toyed with being a pilot but I dint go past the psychomotor test. I also thought about being a doctor but I would learn later that was just me being young and ambitious! By the time I was finishing high school I had not laid my finger yet on what I really want to be in life. We were served a pamphlet of all the courses available in our Kenyan system and without any clue what I really wanted. Since I had a liking for physics and sciences generally I would chose an engineering related field.
In college I met this friend who was geeky and would stay up all night on his laptop doing whatever I dint understand. This would turn out to be the person that changed my course for good. He would push me to fidget with computers. According to him computers were as easy to understand as phones! I never believed a word he said but still somehow he pushed me over the edge. When I started watching tutorials and tried my first code and worked, I felt as though I was one of the bad boy programmers already.
Fast forward am loving the way tech has given me freedom to imagine and create. The abstraction of physical things and scenarios really make tech a wonder in my world. That you can simulate processes even without the physical participants is just amazing. This has reduced cost of research and destructive tests that otherwise real money is lost. Time to product launch has reduced significantly and unprecedented situations are arrested way before they even happen. I finally found my place and am comfortable in tech.
Last year I participated in the mainframe contest and the knowledge I acquired was enormous. It was then that I got to learn about enterprise computing. This new field is under evangelised. The mainframe clocking millions of transactions ahead of the biggest names in tech is interesting. Who would've thought ! I call it the silent King! The only thing that I dint like about COBOL is its structured nature, especially coming from the world of OOP. However I would understand later that to secure these millions of transactions the language is just good being structured. This increases the security of data and any fraudulent or even phishing kind of attack cannot go through the mainframe. That part I liked. The last thing a business would want is to a looted account.