I'm Francis Nduamaka. I live in Lagos, where I build the future.
From the beginning, I've had an insatiable curiosity about how things work, and I guess it was inevitable that I ended up in the tech space. My journey has been quite interesting, demonstrating my ability to adapt and evolve in our ever-changing world.
When I was gearing up for my undergraduate studies, I was dead set on petroleum engineering. I applied a couple of times, but it was super competitive, and I didn't get in. So, I went with chemistry instead, and thankfully, I got accepted into the university. During my first year, I rocked the chemistry department, but deep down, I still had my heart set on pursuing petroleum engineering.
Eventually, I made the switch and graduated with a solid second-class upper degree in petroleum engineering. But getting a job in the oil and gas sector was tough, so I ended up teaching STEM courses to high school students for about 20 months. It was during that time that I took on an online master's program in financial engineering with the WorldQuant University, and that was when my programming journey really kicked off.
Back in 2017, during my online master's program, I dipped my toes into programming and wrote my very first program using Python. It was a wild ride exploring numerical analysis, machine learning, quantitative finance, derivatives, and risk management tasks.
My interest in programming got ignited, and lucky me, around the same time, I scored two scholarships for a master's degree. At first, I hopped on the petroleum engineering train in January 2018, but my programming passion pulled me in, and I ended up switching to computer science. Finally, I nailed it, graduating with distinction in computer science in June 2019, and guess what? Bagged my first software engineering gig as a Jr. developer with Andela.
Over the past few years, I have honed my frontend engineering skills and even had the chance to hold a lead frontend engineering position, albeit in a smaller company. In my most recent role, I served as a senior frontend engineer at fulfil.io.
In the current job market, it's quite challenging to showcase my skills as most of the projects I've worked on are closed-source. I haven't had the opportunity to contribute to open-source projects yet. To address this, I've made the decision to create a personal website, where I can track my progress, increase my visibility, and have a platform to showcase my work and build up my portfolio.
Today, my main goal is to become a founder, and I've been busy exploring a couple of startup ideas. To get these ideas rolling, I had to master UI/UX design using Figma, so I could whip up some snazzy MVP designs. And on the backend front, I dived into Nestjs, a cool Node.js framework, to set up those backend services in a sleek, minimalist style. The end game? Develop an awesome MVP product, launch it, and see how it gains traction in the market!
So, during this journey, I've been riding the AI wave to supercharge the process. While I'm grinding away at my startup ideas, I'm also on the hunt for a role where I can put my expertise to work. My dream role? Teaming up with some kickass folks, tackling meaningful projects, and growing like crazy both personally and professionally.