From High School to Hello World: What Nobody Warned Me About

I did not plan to end up at a coding apprenticeship. I finished high school and my sister told me about Zone01 Kisumu. I applied. I got in. I showed up on the first day with genuinely no idea what I had signed up for. That is the honest starting point. Zone01 does not ease you in. There is no teacher, no syllabus handed to you, no "week one is for beginners." You get a project, a deadline, and a room full of other people who are also confused. The first thing I learned had nothing to do with code — it was that asking for help is not weakness. It is just how the place works. The language we use is Go. I had never touched it before. Go is not forgiving. It will not compile if you have a variable sitting there unused. It will not let things slide. Early on that felt personal, like the language had decided it did not like me. I would stare at an error for an hour and feel like I was the problem. There was one project that genuinely broke me. I kept running it, kept getting errors, kept cha