My Two Month Journey at TIIDELAB
My journey with TIIDELAB has been nothing short of amazing, in these six weeks, I've able to get a good grasp of leadership, team work and AI tools.
My name is Seung-wa Akpan, I will be sharing my experience in the TIIDELAB Pre-fellowship 4.0 in this article.
A mentor of mine sent me the Pre-fellowship registration link. At the time I was still in school, so I worried about the time commitment that would be required to excel in such a program, This was not my first time hearing about TIIDELAB. My mentor himself was a beneficiary of the program so I had high expectations I decided to give it a chance and here I am today. I'm really grateful.
Without further ado, I'll now get into the activities I participated in during the course of the Pre-fellowship.
The first session from TIIDELAB was the onboarding session, which took place on June 20th. We got introduced to TIIDELAB, organizers of the program, activities we would be carrying out in the coming weeks, how the whole program was going to be like and tips to succeed in the program.
In the first week, we were introduced to the basics of web development, HTML and CSS. We learnt this through Uncle Big Bay's learning platform; codewithunclebigbay.com. He guided us through creating a barbershop website from the structure to the styling. We were also asked to find accountability partners and accountability groups to enable us have a support system to be always updated on classes, assignments etc. By the end of the week we had our town hall session and we elected our class governor and deputy.
In the second week, we were introduced to CSS and we applied it in the barbershop website which we started building from week 1. In this week we were assigned to teams. I was in Team 7 we came up with the name KodeCrafters and I was elected Team Lead along with my assistant Nafisat Adams.
In the third week, we were introduced to responsive design and design approaches in website development, namely desktop first and mobile first, to ensure you website looks good across different screen sizes. We learnt about viewports, media queries, min and max width properties. In this week, things got serious. All teams were allocated different projects. Keep in mind that this Pre-fellowship was AI focused. We were all given projects that require us to incorporate AI tools. For Team 7, we were tasked with building a text to image generator. The project requirements were:
Accept text input directly in the terminal.
Display the generated image in a suitable format (e.g., save to a file, display in a simple image viewer).
Allow users to save the generated images to a file (e.g., PNG, JPEG).
Integrate AI APIs to enhance image generation capabilities and produce more detailed images.
We has brainstorming sessions to come up with a name for the product and a logo. We came up with the name text2image. We also began work on the landing page for this website, we were opportune to have a product designer (Nafisat Adams) in our team and she came up with a design we were able to implement. We had our first sprint presentation that week and I represented my team. We got feedback from Mr Shamsudeen Aderoju and mentors on the call, we also built portfolio projects this week. It was a challenging week.
In the fourth week, we were introduced to the python programming language. We learnt how to install python and the basics of python; data types and data structures. We also rounded up the implementation of our landing page and presented it in the sprint presentation.
In the fifth week, we learnt how to create virtual environments with the python package virtualenv, I found this interesting, creating a virtual environment allows you to install libraries, in an isolated environment without affecting your general environment. This is done to avoid clashes with other libraries in other projects. We also learnt about APIs, we learnt about the base URL to call an API and various endpoints that might be available to consumers, we also learnt about HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT and UPDATE. Armed with this knowledge, I and my team mates sourced for AI API's to use for our project. We finally decided upon Stability AI, precisely the Stable Diffusion 3 model. During this week, we also had a session with an AI experts who exposed us to the opportunities in the field and answered our questions.
In this sixth week, I and my team have been able to complete our product and adhere to all product requirements, we were able to implement additional features, we will be doing our final sprint presentation today. I'm confident in our success.
Check out our product here: https://text2image-khaki.vercel.app/get-started.html
This has been a very exciting journey, I'm eager to explore the possibilities in AI working with Python. I'm glad I joined the program and I'm looking forward to qualifying for the fellowship.
Thank you for reading!!