G R A C E
From the time I left secondary school in 2017, I discovered that I was passionate about how technology solves problems. I went online and I began to read things about tech and that got me more interested in being a part of the tech community. I had to stay at home for one year after my secondary school and so, in the course of that gap year, I had tried to learn Java. All this while we lived in Suleja.
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I got admission to study Computer Science in Bida, Niger State and I graduated September 2021. In Bida, we never really studied the practical aspect of computer science – just theories and theories. Recently, my family relocated to Ibadan; when we got here, I had just been at home with so much free time and barely anything to do. I figured out that this free period might be a good time to get some hands-on training in tech which I didn’t get in Bida.
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I began to make enquiries about where I could learn frontend development and Larva Academy came in recommended and so I paid the fees and joined the program. From the first day, the two tutors made themselves available to me – they took me through the basics as though I was a real beginner. It didn’t change anything that I had studied Computer Science in school. It was here, at Larva, that I learnt to code properly; it was also here to I realized that there were certain assumptions I had made about the coding processes that turned out to be wrong.
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Before I came here, what I could do was copy and paste codes from the internet and then edit a few things to personalize the codes. It was at Larva that I learned to write my own codes from scratch. All through the 3 months I spent here, I learnt HTML, Javascript (basics) and CSS.
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I like to document whatever I am learning and so I started posting my learning experience on my blog; I write about a new skill or process I have learnt. Writing these things on my blog opened up doors for me to write content in the tech industry. So, I am both a front-dev person and a technical writer too.
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If I have to compare what I learned in Bida and what I learned in Larva, what I learned at Bida is not up to a quarter of what I learned in three months at Larva. If I’m being honest, at Bida, I learnt a lot of theoretical stuff but hardly ever did we get exposed to the real practical stuff.
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I applied for visas to the UK and Canada and I put my tech skills as part of my documentation. In developed countries where hands-on skills matter a lot, everything I learnt at Larva became what I put together to market myself and get me ahead in the interviews and visa review process. Imagine if I hadn’t acquired more in-depth skills, I wouldn’t have had a portfolio to showcase and I wouldn’t have had a thriving blog to showcase my knowledge and growth process.
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Coming here gave me a chance to boost up my knowledge and upskill. It changed the game for me completely.
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PS: Grace eventually relocated to Canada few months after we had this short conversation with her.
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F I Y I N
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I was on a long holiday from school and my mom figured that I shouldn’t spend all that free time sitting down at home doing nothing. She asked me what I would like to do with the free time and, quickly, I answered “Computer lessons.”. My mom went on google and was searching for coding schools in Ibadan but I was specific that I wanted to learn UI/UX (UI/UX is simply design – you’re simply designing for web solutions), and so she searched again and that was how she found Larva Academy.
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My mom and I came to Larva and we had a tour of the place, I liked what I had seen – the space, the teachers and all. After the tour, my mom asked me if I wanted to go size up someplace else, I told her straight how I felt about Larva. I loved the location – it is in the heart of Bodija, very quiet and very safe. There’s hardly any distraction around here.
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I resumed the following Monday, and something interesting happened – Mr. Danjuma took me to meet a student who was designing a new interface for Netflix. The student began to show me tools to use and what those tools were for. What blew my mind about it all was finding out that the student who was redesigning the Netflix interface had only just begun to learn how to design too.
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I got into Larva but then my laptop developed a fault – that meant that I was learn stuff but I didn’t have a laptop to work with, and that was just frustrating. In those early days, I had to wait till there was a free laptop I could borrow to practice. Eventually, my mom got an engineer to fix my laptop and that problem was solved. I could then fully face my UI/UX pursuit.
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When I came in, I was the youngest student here and I just had mixed feelings: I was scared and excited all at the same time. Thing is, the other students never made me feel like I was the youngest; they were always easy to relate with and whenever I was stuck on a task, they related with me as those we were all mates. That really helped me settle in easily and get started with my program.
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My first project at Larva was creating a traveling app. With the app, you could book flights from Lagos to China, Rome…anywhere in the world. I did the landing page, the documentation page, the booking page, and the payment page. Then I went on to prototype it on my phone so you could see how it would work once the codes were embedded in the design.
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My mom has been supportive and has been very proud of my journey so far and I just want to do something – to show her that I am not just playing away here at Larva and also to appreciate her for everything. I want to surprise her. I am going to design an app for her business. For now, I am just collecting all the information I need to design a beautiful and functional app for her.
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I am in S.S.1 now and so I can’t talk too much about my future plans but one thing I know is that when I finish from secondary school, I would love to build applications that will be on people’s phones and would help solve people’s problems. Till then, I will always come back to Larva to refresh and stay connected to the learning process till when I graduate and can go mainstream.
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M A Y M U N A H
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I am a student of the University of Ilorin and ASUU has been on strike for a few months now. One day, while scrolling through Facebook, I saw the post about Larva Academy on Omo Alhaja (a friend)’s Facebook and that was I got an itch to get on the tech journey, after all, I was at home. My dad who is a lecturer at the Polytechnic of Ibadan never knew about my interest in UI/UX design and I wasn’t going to ask him for the fees because he may not quite get what the value of the course.
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In order to raise the fees, I had to hustle for the money. I didn’t tell him because if I had told him, he may not have seen the point of trying to get a tech skill. When I say I hustled for the money, I worked. I worked as a teacher in a school and I also took on writing gigs. I saved up the money to enrol at Larva. About a week to when I was going to resume classes, on a Friday, I then told my dad that I would be going to Bodija.
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My dad wouldn’t let us just go out of the house without any tangible purpose, and being a lecturer, he is very big on education. He asked me what I was going to do in Bodija and I told him. He asked me what tech was about but I really didn’t know how to explain to him, I sha told him that it had to do with operating laptop. It wasn’t convincing enough. There was a man in our area who was into web-development and so I used him as reference to explain to my dad what my mission to Bodija was about.
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My father’s next concern was what would happen if ASUU called off the strike midway into the program. I allayed his fears by telling him that there was an online class and so I could continue if I returned to school. It was then that he allowed me leave the house. I enrolled for the UI/UX course and I was due to start classes the next Monday.
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Because the name of the school was “Academy” I had expected that it would be like normal Nigerian school system where the teacher comes, dictate notes and leaves. I had my first class and it blew my mind. The classes were 100% practical from Day 1. Mr. Mahi, our tutor, was very intentional about how he taught us. He showed us how every tool on the design interface worked, inspired us with creative ideas and motivated us to try and design something too. On my first day at Larva, I designed a food app.
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I have been here for a month and things have moved smoothly for me. I thrive in an environment where there are people whom I can benefit from and Larva provides me with just that. The beautiful thing about Larva is that everyone relates well, everyone shares knowledge and everyone cares enough about what the other person is doing. So, you can easily approach someone who is way ahead of you in the curriculum to help you navigate a task and they gladly will.
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I have not shown my father any of the designs that I have done but he is invested in my progress. Once I leave Larva, I go to my dad’s office at the Polytechnic of Ibadan and there, he allows me work and do my thing, then in the evening, we’d go home together. My step-mom, on the other hand, has seen some of my designs. I know my dad may have seen some of the things I have done while working in his office but I try to not let him see them.
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Two weeks ago, in the presence of my step-mom, my father asked me: “hope you are not wasting money in this program that you’re doing?” I cleared my throat and turned to my step mom and replied: “Mom, sheybi you have seen my designs and the things I am doing, oya tell your husband”. She replied me that I should defend myself, after all, na me dey learn UI/UX, not her. We all just burst into laughter. In a month of being at Larva, I have done about 15 tasks. My favorite of all my tasks is designing the landing page of a platform for the sales of NFTs.
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I am so neck deep into UI/UX design that it is gradually changing my lifestyle. Before I started classes, I used to watch a lot of Korean series but now, I am too busy to catch up. Not that I don’t watch at all anymore but not like I used to. My mom will always look around for me and when I’m not in sight, she says, “omo yii tun ti n te laptop – this girl is pressing laptop again”. 
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Most of my friends don’t even know about my venture into this tech journey and I deliberately made it so, I want them to know when I become a pro at it and I am making cool money from tech. Just kidding! To make money is cool but solving problems is way cooler. Knowing that a design I am working on can change humanity for good is so a powerful thing to experience.
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Last week, I checked for schools abroad that offer UI/UX and after I am done here, I’d love to travel out to further develop myself in this regard.
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S T E K E N T
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Before I joined Larva, I was into web design. My web design up until when I joined Larva wasn’t original. I learnt web design using WordPress. That meant that I didn’t have to stress myself about codes, I would just take a template, tweak it here and there and I’d have completed a design. I started doing the WordPress thing around 2007 but then I didn’t take it serious as a venture until 2012.
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I could have kept on using WordPress for web development but then, there is a level of web development that goes beyond WordPress. The world today runs on tech and there are projects one might aspire to take on that will not be able to be built using WordPress.
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I have a philosophy and it is that, when the world is moving, move with the time, don’t stay on one spot whereas the world is moving on without you. I wanted to grow with the evolution, I didn’t want to be that guy who got side-lined by the coming of tech so I began to be on the look-out for a place where I could learn coding.
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A friend of mine shared on his Facebook page that if anyone had an interest in web development, they should check out a school called Larva Academy. I looked at the flier and discovered that the school was around my vicinity and that was enough ginger for me to apply. I wanted to learn all of web development, which would make a full stack developer but when I got here, I was told to focus on frontend development first.
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Originally, I did not know anything about codes or coding. All those HTML, Javascript etc. I did not have a clue what they were about. In my first two weeks at Larva, coding looked like Greek. The tutor who taught me in the first week did not even help matters – he wasn’t breaking the concepts down for a slow learner like me to get it and, at some point, I was going to just give up. However, the tutor was replaced with a new and better one who teaches me at my level, as someone who doesn’t know anything.
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I call myself a slow learner because I have so many things on your plate calling for my attention. I am married and I have my family to take care of. I also have my business venture which is what puts food on my table and helps me to take care of my family. It is quite tedious combines these aspects altogether but what I have done is that once I’m in Larva, I focus squarely on coding.
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When I’m at my business venture, my business becomes my sole focus and once I enter my house, my family takes the centre stage. That means when I am given a task, I must finish it up before I get out of here; that’s how I get my tasks done and meet my deadlines without family responsibilities encroaching or being a hindrance. However, I am beginning to see that coding is a jealous activity – the trick to knowing this coding thing is practice and a ton more of practice. In the end, it is the only way to learn it and grow.
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P H O B E A N
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I studied Education at the university and when I graduated, I taught for a while but from when I could remember, I loved sales – meeting people, understanding their needs and providing goods that could meet those needs. That was me. From teaching, I got a job in a mobile phone store company as a sales person. The job required that I worked with all the major brands like Tecno, Infinix, Samsung etc. and because I enjoyed sales, I enjoyed my work.
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Often, people want phones but they can’t select which phone exactly they need; many times, they are confused. It is you the sales person that will find out what they really want from a phone and then match their needs with what is available for sale and their budget. At some point, I left for my NYSC, came back from NYSC and continued working as a sales person. I enjoyed the work so much that I always looked forward to waking up the next day, opening shop and attending to people.
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Then I joined another company, this time, I was in a partnership with a brand. They would bring their products and then I would sell. I became a manager for the brand and it was fun. From Ibadan, I was transferred to Osogbo, then I was transferred back to Ibadan to head another branch. I got married, got pregnant and then, something ugly transpired and I had to leave the company. That was October 2021.
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For me, not having a job to resume to was quite an upset to my already perfect life. Sales was what I had done all my life since I graduated and so it was difficult for me to imagine myself in another line of work. Suddenly, I was staying at home, doing nothing, with nowhere to go. I wasn’t meeting people again; nothing was going on with me and I was very uncomfortable with my state. I made attempts at getting something going for myself. It was while I was dealing with all this that I had my baby and that completely ground me to a halt.
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In the church I attend, we have communities: Student Community, Professionals & Entrepreneurial community, Tech Community etc. Every now and then, a community would come out and make a presentation to the church about what they do, how what they do interfaces with the world and the prospects of the community. One Sunday, the Tech Community in my church made a presentation and that was how I got a bit curious about tech. In the end, I decided to approach the team to know more about what they were really about.
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The members of the Tech Community began to explain their activities and opportunities in tech and as they did, I began to realize that I couldn’t jump into most of what they were talking about because they were really intensive stuff. They were talking about coding, frontend, backend etc and me that I just had my baby, I didn’t see myself fitting in at all. However, there was an aspect of the things they talked about which looked similar to sales and that was UI/UX design. It looked similar to sales because it involved meeting people, understanding their challenges and creating a visual representation of what can solve their problems.
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The Tech Community in church sent e-materials and videos to me as a way to start to learn these skills but I couldn’t settle down to read with a baby to take care of and a home to run. It could be when I settle down to read a material that my baby will start crying and by the time she stops, it is time to fix lunch or run some errands. By the time I’d try to settle down again, I would have been very tired and exhausted.
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In the end, I had to be brutally honest with myself – I couldn’t learn anything on my own. I figured that I would learn better in a real, in-class where I can be with like minds who are pursuing the same goal as me. My husband replied that he did not have the money to sponsor my in-class tech learning.
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Two weeks after, my husband came home and told me that he was making enquiries regarding a tech academy he’d found out through a friend from his hometown. I asked him the name and he said “Larva Academy”. When he mentioned the name, my mind went to a space at Dugbe where I thought people went to learning coding. He then said that it was at Bodija and not Dugbe. I became more confused but I offered to go check out the so called Larva for myself and to see if I’d love what I see.
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I visited Larva Academy to make enquiries and as I stepped into the UI/UX class, I saw a woman hunched over her laptop, working. That alone made me feel like I truly belonged. One of the things that intrigued me was what the founder of Larva Academy said to me: “If you stay with us for two week and you don’t feel like you should be in tech, I will refund your money.” This was in June, 2022. I returned home convinced that Larva was where I was supposed to be. I made arrangements for how to take care of my baby while I am away in class and other things like that; then I resumed UI/UX program at the end of July.
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Learning as a nursing mother is hard. Every day, we are given tasks to solve and, sometimes, it could be overwhelming caring for a baby and also trying to turn in a task before the deadline. As a single lady, it was easy for me to meet up with deadlines for assignments and tasks. As a nursing mother, it is so difficult.
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If we are given 48hrs to turn in a task, trust me when I say my baby and the family needs will take at least 36hours out of the whole 48hrs. That means I fall short of meeting my submission deadlines. Getting back to class to learn as a mother has been very demanding, and that’s even with me getting as much help and support that I can from my husband. So far, in the course of my training, I have been able to accomplish 15 tasks including a cake ordering app and a crypto landing page (below).
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Tech is a jealous industry and to thrive in it, it will require you to give all your time to it. Tech is not something you can do on the side and be half-committed to; for you to flourish in it, you’ve got to give it your all. You have to keep doing and doing it. Even if I say my husband would understand the demands of what I do and I choose to focus on building my UI/UX skills and portfolio, what about my baby? As everyone knows, babies are jealous too – they want you to themselves always.
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However, in all of these struggles, I realized that being a nursing mother has made me put more care into my designs. Anytime I am picking an icon or constructing a design in my mind, I do with so much consciousness and alertness which I didn’t used to have for little things. My designs become like my baby and so I am very intentional about what I put into the design and how I put the elements together. I am conscious of the fact that what I am designing will be used by people and I just mull over how to make the designs perfect for them, like I would try to make something perfect for my own child.
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My time at Larva is coming to an end and I am thinking about what my next steps will be. Some people learn and skill and want to freelance, and be their own master. For me, I will like to be in an organization that is constantly seeking ways to solve problems of their customers. I am not that human who works in isolation – I love working in teams, I believe in congregating together to do stuff and I thrive in such environment so I will be looking out for such environments to plug myself into and grow.
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I don’t think any nursing woman can take up a skill in tech. Before I got into the tech space, I was convinced that it was my space to flourish in. If you spend up to two weeks in Larva, you will know whether this is your thing or you’ve strayed into the wrong discipline. If a nursing mother seeks my honest opinion about joining tech, here is what I will say to them – evaluate yourself.
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Then I will ask the big question – how far are you willing to go to solve someone else’ problem? If you don’t have the patience to sit with someone else’ problem, understand their problem and solve it, don’t come to UI/UX. Really, solving problems – that’s what tech is about.
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M A H I
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When I graduated from high school in 2015, I attended a computer school to learn how to use the Microsoft Suite, typing and all that. Of all the things that caught my attention, it was how to use computers to make graphic designs. In 2016, I was admitted into the Polytechnic Ibadan to study computer science. We did some coding throughout the program but that was all we learned about tech, and in 2018, I graduated.
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I got admission into the University of Ilorin in 2019 and it was while in Ilorin that I met two guys who were designers. At first, I thought they were graphic designers like me but I soon found out that they were not designing fliers or posters, theirs was not the regular graphic design which I knew about. I found out that they were designing for web, software, mobile applications etc; that became the first time I heard about UI/UX design. I became interested.
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In 2020, the lockdown was implemented and I was in Ilorin along with one of the guys who was already a pro at UI/UX. I was hungry to know more about and be able to design for tech solutions too, so I declared my intentions to learn. Because I had a background in graphics design, it was easy to familiarize myself with tools for UI/UX design. Gradually, I began and because I am a very fast learner, I got a hang of it pretty quickly. At some point when there was so much panic regarding the virus, I was summoned to return home; that was when I left Ilorin and returned to my parents’ place in Iseyin. So, if you ask me, I’ll say my UI/UX journey began in 2020.
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In February 2022, a friend from Iseyin who graduated from the Product Management cohort at Larva Academy; on the day he completed the program, he posted about it on his Facebook and that was the first time I heard about Larva. In April, he posted about a vacancy at Larva Academy for a UI/UX tutor and I applied. When I was invited over for an interview, I was panicking as I journeyed down because, at the time, I was mostly freelancing, taking on UI/UX gigs. I had only taught people within informal settings, never in a formal set up like Larva. I remember texting my girlfriend when I got there that – “omo, my legs are shaking o”. In the end, the interview turned out fine and I got the job.
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Let me be sincere with you, teaching has never been a big deal to me. My course of study in the University of Ilorin is Educational Technology and so that situates me in the line of education as a professional. Also, my father has an Arabic school and I have been teaching the school for over ten years. When I say an Arabic school, I am not talking about the Ile-Keu that is popular, he runs a Madrassah. In that sense, teaching is not strange to me but teaching tech was a different kind of challenge.
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When I started to teach here, I was teaching adults who were older than me – 30+ people – and that kind of made me find teaching at Larva quite delicate at first. At the time, there were two Larva Academy students who used to come all the way from Iseyin to Ibadan every day. Usually, I’ll come with them on Monday, then I will stay in Ibadan till Thursday or Friday, and then I’ll return to Iseyin with them. One of them was my teacher in secondary school. Imagine that – me teaching someone that was my own teacher in secondary school! It wasn’t easy at all.
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Also, there was a tutor who had taught UI/UX at Larva before me and on my first day, I was to take on the cohort he led halfway through the rest of the curriculum. I was a bit worried that they might not like me and that they might prefer the tutor who left to me. For these reasons, when I started, I used to be nervous and that made me to relearn and relearn. I will learn everything in the topic for myself all over again just so that I will be able to break it down to my students without fumbling. While on my own, I began to practice teaching the topics ahead of the class as though the class was on. I always wanted to be sure I’d dotted my “i” and crossed my “t”. It paid off in the end.
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Now that we have kids in the academy, the teaching process is very different. While it is easier to use everyday experiences to teach adults, but kids learn better with instructions. Also, kids get distracted very easily and so I have to be lenient and firm at the same time. I relate with them freely so that they can feel interested in learning but I am firm too because I feel they must not let their parents’ money go to waste. The secret in being a good kiddies’ teacher is striking a balance – if I get too strict, then they will lose interest in learning and so I have to be friendly and accessible while strict too. If you ask me, I think the kids love me.
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One day, after school, I was on a video call with my girlfriend and Fiyin was around, still practising and working on a task. Everyone calls him my son and so he is familiar with me. On the basis of that I invited him to come talk to my girlfriend. She greeted him and told him he was a fine boy. I wrapped up the call and left. I returned to class the next day to and found something on the board. Fiyin wrote: MR. MAHI’S GIRLFRIEND SAID I AM A FINE BOY. Unfortunately, everyone had seen it before I arrived and so erasing it wouldn’t change anything. You can see how Fiyin cast me .
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My proudest moment as a teacher has to do with teaching a particular nursing mother. At the very beginning, she struggled very much. She had never put on a laptop before; then someone gifted her a MacBook and that just got so hard for her to figure out. She got frustrated with the Mac Book and was looking to exchange it for a Windows laptop. She was so frustrated. Today, if you see her designs, you will not believe that just some weeks ago, this woman couldn’t put on a laptop.
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