At the age of six, Agboola Joshua, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Joshfortech, started coding and building competence in several programming languages. Recently, he was named the youngest certified cloud practitioner in Africa.
The young programmer, technology speaker, and YouTuber added a new medal to his collection when, at the age of 13, he passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam and became the youngest Certified Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner in Africa.
Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that external providers host and make available to users online.
Joshua’s response, when asked what motivated him to pull off this achievement, was, “I had known for a long time that cloud computing was one of the developing areas of the IT sector and one of the defining technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Yet when I had to use MongoDB on one of my artificial intelligence projects, its significance became abundantly clear to me.
“MongoDB is a document-oriented database for high-volume storage. It provided flexibility and the ability to store data in different volumes because it was cloud-based. This got me curious enough to study more about the cloud. However, the idea of going deeper in my search for knowledge and getting certified was first muted by my dad.”
Joshua cited the huge variety of services and solutions offered by Amazon Web Services as the reason he decided to go the AWS certification route. AWS is now leading the field of cloud computing, followed by Google Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure.
“I decided to follow the leader because I believe AWS will continue to dominate the space for years to come. Besides, I found that there was quite an awesome amount of training resources from Amazon itself and from other members of the cloud community on AWS Cloud certifications that made the learning and certification journey easier for me,” the youngest certified cloud practitioner revealed.
Joshua said when asked what he planned to do after receiving his certification that he intended to use the AWS knowledge he had gained for his existing projects.
The 13-year-old stated, “I want to use my knowledge from the Cloud Practitioner certification to ensure that I can engage the cloud most advantageously for my AI projects.
He went on to say that he hopes to own a cloud services business in the future and that he wants to compete in the DevOps engineering market.
TRIBUNE ONLINE quoted him as saying, “I am actually of the opinion that adults keep underestimating what we young people can do if given the right environment.
“Imagine a programme saying I would have to be 18 before I could learn cloud computing. If I didn’t have options, what I just accomplished could have been buried because of this limitation.
“So, my other motivation for achieving this feat is to demonstrate to my young friends what we are capable of doing and to also show that great brains are coming out of Africa.”
Began coding at the age of 6
“Indeed, I was introduced to programming when I was 6 years old by my parents, who enrolled me in a summer computer school. They registered me for tech classes at CCHub when I was 7 years old. I gained first-hand knowledge on how to code there. I received a scholarship to study software engineering at Semicolon three years later. I currently know how to use a variety of programming languages and frameworks. I recently received my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification from Amazon. Learning, gaining abilities, and using those skills has been a wonderful adventure. My interest in technology is motivated by the chance to create answers and solve issues that programming affords me,” the youngest certified cloud practitioner in Africa said.
Fame and passion for tech
Joshua said, “We stand tall and see far because we are standing on the shoulders of giants, according to an adage. That is how I would characterise it. The increased visibility has brought me a lot of friends and followers, opened up chances for me, helped me win a few awards, and increased media coverage for me. Together with other prizes, I won the MTN Hackathon for my work on Kagukar and the Indomie Heroes award in the intellectual category. This focus has also motivated me to continually learn and add value in the tech sector.”
