Last year during my NYSC service at a hospital in Uran Akpan, Akwa Ibom State, I got the opportunity that changed my tech journey.

The hospital had an affiliated School of Health called Becohtech, and the school wanted to expand its reach online by building a website. I volunteered to handle the project and submitted my proposal. After a series of interviews, I was eventually given the job—partly because I was more affordable (anything to secure the bag, right? 😅) and also because I lived within the school premises (NYSC lodge advantage!).

Now here’s the twist—I was primarily a frontend developer. At the time, I didn’t have solid backend experience. But I had a close friend who was my usual backend partner, so I figured we could tackle the project like we always did: I’d handle the UI/UX and frontend logic, he’d handle the backend.

Getting started was smooth. I had already been tweaking a frontend template since submitting my proposal, so I was way ahead on that end. But reality hit when my friend started slowing down the backend progress, and the management began requesting weekly updates.

And guess what? There was nowhere to hide. I lived in the same compound as the school admin 😅. I had promised to deliver the project in 3 months—and with just 6 weeks left and no functional backend, I knew I had to take matters into my own hands.

That’s when I made the decision to learn backend development using PHP.

I got my own local server set up and jumped into PHP. Luckily, I already had a bit of an edge because I had some backend programming experience with Java. I figured, “How hard can PHP be?”—well, it was a challenge. Learning a new language overnight, understanding PHP syntax, server configuration, writing classes, setting up databases with PDO… it was a lot.

But slowly, it all started to make sense.

Big shoutout to ChatGPT and Stack Overflow—my true MVPs during debugging sessions and late-night code frustrations.

In the end, I built both the admin and student dashboards from scratch, each with their own functionalities—user authentication, CRUD operations, session management, data visualization, and more.

Fast forward one year later, I can now confidently say I’m a backend developer specializing in PHP. It wasn’t always smooth—some bugs took days to squash, some optimizations kept me up at night—but I’m truly proud of how far I’ve come.

Looking back, I’m grateful I didn’t give up. That one decision to step out of my comfort zone opened the door to a whole new skill set.

I still have a long way to go, but the journey is worth it.

To anyone out there doubting themselves: start where you are. Growth happens when you take that leap.

#PHP #BackendDevelopment #DeveloperJourney #NYSCExperience #WebDevelopment #Motivation #LearningByDoing #TechJourney #SoftwareEngineering #FullStackDeveloper