I joined Zone01 Kisumu's Cohort 1 back in March, after making it through the Piscine. A few months in, here's a quick, honest update on where things stand.
What I've actually built
lem-in — an ant colony pathfinding project in Go, done with a teammate. I handled the parser/validation side, he handled the solver. Chased down a nasty BFS bug that kept us from finding the optimal disjoint paths, and fixed an infinite-loop edge case that nearly cost us the deadline.
Groupie Tracker — a Go web app consuming a music artist API. I led this one, and most of the "fun" was in bugs you don't expect: static file serving, route patterns not matching, template fields silently mismatching.
AidStream — a hackathon project, a blockchain-based aid distribution platform. I was the database developer, working with PostgreSQL on Neon.tech.
The forum project — a group web forum built in Go with SQLite, currently in progress. I'm team lead on this one.
Kisumu Marketplace — my personal project, a full-stack secondhand clothes marketplace. Go/Gin backend, React frontend. This one's actually been rebuilt from scratch after my laptop broke and I lost the original work.
What's changed since day one
I came in only knowing the basics from the Piscine. Since then the biggest shift hasn't been technical skill exactly — it's been comfort with not knowing something yet. Early on, an unfamiliar bug felt like a wall. Now it mostly feels like a puzzle with a few obvious places to start looking.
Leading team projects has also been a bigger adjustment than I expected. Splitting ownership, keeping people unblocked, and making sure nobody's work quietly breaks somebody else's — that's a different skill from writing good code, and I'm still learning it.
What's next
Finish deploying the marketplace backend on Railway and frontend on Vercel
M-Pesa Daraja API integration
Keep pushing the forum project forward with the team
Write more, ship more, break fewer things (we'll see)
The honest bit
Some weeks feel like real progress. Some weeks feel like I fixed one bug and created two more. Both are apparently normal. I'll check back in a few months and see how this reads then.