After completing the Google Africa Scholarship in 2018 for the Mobile Web Specialist track, I got the privilege of choosing any of the 3 tracks available in 2019 so I chose the Google Cloud Engineer track. 

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I hope to gain the necessary cloud computing skills needed for me to leverage cloud technologies in my work. I already have some experience however I expect to dive deeper with this course.

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I am very grateful to the Andela Learning Community (ALC) for their proud support along this new journey and the previous one.

I received an email from Udacity about applying for the Pytorch Data Science Challenge Scholarship for interested developers across the world shortly after I completed the Google Africa Challenge in September 2018 or so. I was excited about it because it was the first time I got the opportunity to do what I will call 'state-of-the-art Data Science'.

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Despite fears that the fierce competition may not help me who had no prior experience with real-world data science, I got accepted.

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Participating in the Challenge, I worked with deep learning
techniques to predict flower species using Facebook’s Pytorch framework and data from ImageNet. Achievement-wise, I used data visualization techniques to communicate the model’s performance efficiently using bar charts and used deep learning to predict flower species with an 82% accuracy rate. 

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The codes can be found here https://github.com/SackeyDavid/Flower-Image-Classification

My programming mentor Steve Andor sent a link to me via WhatsApp. It was the Google Africa Scholarship Challenge 2018. I had seen it earlier on a billboard or so and online but I didn't feel like applying. 

After Steve invited me to participate, I decided to apply and surprisingly I was accepted. Steve played a huge role in that acceptance. It was through his Teaching Assistance for the Introduction to Java Programming Course in college second year that I fell deeply in love with scaling my programming skills. He also introduced the class including me to Github which I think was essential to obtaining the scholarship. 

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As a requirement for completion of the 2018 Google African Challenge Scholarship course from Udacity, I built an offline currency converter app by fetching conversion rates via an API and storing them locally using browser cache.

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I thereafter got accepted to phase 2 of the scholarship where I took advanced courses in Javascript technology from Pluralsight.

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I am really grateful to Google and the ALC for their support and help throughout the process.

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The codes for the app I built can be found here https://github.com/SackeyDavid/7daysofCode1

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