My Acceptance into HNG i11
Table of contents
I enrolled in AltSchool's Backend Engineering program late last year (2023) and I was recently placed in a team of almost 20 people from different tracks, ranging from Cloud engineering, Product Design, Project Management, Data Analysis, Data Science, Backend engineering etc.
We were all grouped together and tasked with building a real-life project that solves one of the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Our team was tasked with building an web application that assists women during their pregnancy journey. We chose this project because we realized that there are no many applications targeted at young babies or pregnant women in sub-saharan Africa.
The name of our project is BumpGuide: Here's the link to the backend code: https://github.com/bumpguide/bumpguide-backend/
Challenges faced
Despite the numerous members of our team, only a few of us showed up for critical meetings to discuss how on how to proceed with our project. Thi really set us back as we were always submitting reports near our deadlines.
Being the only Backend guy in the team, the workload has been overwhelming, but I did manage to implement the backend to some extent. In fact, I am currently waiting for the frontend guy to implement build some forms before I continue working on the project.
The most difficult challenge I faced working on the backend was implementing authentication. I didn't want to to use a third-party authentication because I really wanted to understand how it worked under then hook. It took me a whole 7 days of writing notes and trying different things before things started clicking.
Now, I can confidently implement JWT authentication and HTTP basic authentication without using a 3rd party provider.
I read so much about authentication that I actually understand how symmetric and asymmetric authentication and encryption work under the hood, I studied the two most popular web authentication and encryption algorithms (RSA and HS256.)
Although, progress has really slowed down on our project, I still believe we can bring the project to life.
Working on this project has taught me a lot about teamwork, agile workflow, communication and it has ultimately solidified my knowledge of the FastAPI framework which I am using to build the backend.
Discovering HNG
I was going through Twitter sometime last month when a tweet about the HNG Internship showed up. Anyone who's into tech in Nigeria knows how prestigious the HNG internship is. With the little technical experience I've gained at AltSchool in the past year I couldn't pass up this wonderful opportunity and I am happy to be among the beneficiaries of this internship.
You can visit any of the following links to learn more about HNGs internship and job opportunities:
Internship (Free)
Internship (Premium)