My name is Muhammad Jalloh.
I grew up loving languages (I speak Fulani, Arabic, English and some Spanish), literature and books. (I know you know where I am going with this ... :) )
After high school, I fell in love with computers and got my first computer-related Diploma.
Then, I fell in head over heels with programming and decided to forego what would have led to a career in Accounting to doing web development.
I started with Django (after some frustrating attempts to learn it at PyCon US 2013). I even offered an author (at the conference) some money to teach me Django, but never got a response to my text message with that offer.
Anyway, I learned Django (and some of its packages like GeoDjango, etc.) and got my first coding job as a Junior Backend Developer.
That quickly turned into a Fullstack role when it turned out I was the only one on the team who knew AngularJS (the precursor to the current Angular frontend framework).
So, I worked on the backend (that used a legacy Django project and a new-and-coming Flask backend) and wrote the frontend Angular app to go with the backend.
After that job, I learned the new (component-based) Angular framework and a new framework/library that was making the waves in the frontend community called ReactJS.
I soon shelved Angular in favor of React and would only barely look at Angular when it is required for a project at my job.
In-between jobs, I have worked both as a Freelance Writer and as a Freelance Web Developer.
When I am not writing code or fiddling with the terminal or that new book on the CLI, Databases or something-else, my heart wanders into the wilderness of poetry and I find myself writing poems (in whatever language I was thinking in when the inspiration came knocking on my heart's door.)
Most of my poems are romantic (trust me, I was single and had a silver tongue and a heart that loved and loved to compose rhymes to express those thoughts to the nameless dame in my head.) But I have also written some elegies (for my ancestors) and some more "social" ones.
When my mind is less-occupied with the daily grind of building platforms, I like to observe the social norms, customs and interactions of the humans of earth between them and their own kind, among them and "the others" and how they relate willingly, knowingly or confusedly with The Divine that placed them on Mother Earth.
I identify with some human struggles more than others but understand (in various degrees and for different reasons) why people behave in certain ways or refuse to accept certain "logical" ways of life.
In 2018, I had the "fantastic" idea to launch a website where I can collect some of my technical thoughts and publish tutorials to help my fellow developers avoid the trips and traps I encountered and learn the tips, tricks and best practices to better develop great websites.
And, so, at PyCon US 2018 (in Cleveland, Ohio), I went to the local library and deployed what would be the first version of this platform.
In 2019, I renamed it "NodeVersity" as a platform (or virtual one-man "university" of sorts) to help developers learn (through my web development guides and courses) how to become better Web Developers.
And, that's how we got here.
But the journey of a million miles is still ongoing ...
Thank you for joining me.
You can follow my technical musings on the Tech Kalam blog or read (free but comprehensive) web development guides I publish in the DevRoom section of the platform.
If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please, reach out to me via LinkedIn (with a non-generic note, please) and I will get back to you as soon (and as quickly) as possible, God willing.