Nobody Was Watching

School was over, but I wasn't ready to go home yet.

I'd go back to the staff room, open my laptop, and start coding.

At the time, I was serving in Katsina as a Basic Technology teacher. I knew NYSC was only twelve months, and I didn't want those twelve months to pass without making good use of them.

So whenever I had free time after school, I coded.

Sometimes I stayed in the staff room. Other times, I went home and continued there.

I was living alone, and there wasn't anyone around me doing the same thing. Nobody was checking whether I had studied that day. Nobody was asking what I had built. There was no manager giving me something to learn.

I just knew what I wanted.

By the end of NYSC, I wanted to be in a better position to get gigs and continue growing as a developer.

I had to make the time count

I didn't have a perfect plan.

I was still learning. There were still many things I didn't understand, and I was figuring things out as I went.

But I knew I couldn't spend twelve months waiting for the right opportunity to come.

So I used the time I had.

I built a website for Mstack Solutions. I built dashboard layouts because I wanted to get better at building interfaces. I tried different things just to understand how they worked.

This was also the period when another Corp member introduced me to Next.js.

I started learning it and building with it.

I didn't want to spend all my time watching someone else code. Once I understood the basics, I wanted to try it myself.

That's how I learned.

Nobody was telling me what to do

Looking back, this was probably one of the most important parts of that period.

There was no instructor telling me what to study every day.

There was no assignment waiting for me.

There was no one checking whether I opened my laptop when I got home.

If I didn't do anything that day, nobody would know.

That meant I had to make the decision for myself.

I had to show up even when nobody was asking me to.

Some days were more productive than others, but I kept coming back to it.

I wasn't always motivated.

I just knew that I wanted to get better.

I learned by building

I've always believed that the best way for me to learn is to build.

Tutorials helped me understand the basics, but building showed me what I actually understood and what I didn't.

You can watch someone build a dashboard and feel like you understand it.

Then you try to build one yourself and realize there are still things you don't know.

That's what made building useful for me.

Every project exposed another gap.

And once I found that gap, I had something specific to learn.

That's how I approached Next.js during NYSC.

I learned the basics, then I built.

I built the Mstack Solutions website.

I built dashboard layouts.

I experimented with different pages and interfaces.

I wasn't trying to build the perfect product. I was trying to get better.

Those twelve months mattered

When I look back at my NYSC year, I don't remember every tutorial I watched or every line of code I wrote.

I remember using the time I had.

I remember going back to the staff room after school and opening my laptop.

I remember going home and doing the same thing.

Nobody was watching.

But I was.

I knew what I wanted those twelve months to become, and I knew I had to do something about it.

That period taught me that dedication isn't about being motivated every day.

Sometimes it's simply deciding that you're going to show up again.

I didn't know exactly where all that work would lead. I just knew that doing nothing wasn't going to get me where I wanted to go.

By the time NYSC ended, I wasn't where I had started.

I had built things.

I had learned Next.js.

I had become more comfortable writing code.

And, perhaps more importantly, I had learned that I could rely on myself to keep learning even when nobody was there to tell me what to do.

Nobody was watching.

I kept going anyway.