Building a High Quality Project Within Days — at Andela
The workload is big, I know. But that’s what sets the pace — Me

This is boot-camp week 1.
And we are working at 18 to 20 hours per day. This is software development you know. But there’s more to it. Because this is software development at Andela.
What makes the difference? Speed. Accuracy. Teamwork.
A goal is set. You need to develop a Python flask application that users can record/keep their bucket-lists. In simple terms, a to do list but for storing long term goals and dreams.
But there’s a catch — data should be non-persistent. Meaning no database. I must say this has taught me a great deal of data structures, because you need to determine how you are going to store that data — the user’s account credentials, the bucket-list data and the activity data.
Think of it this way: a user has many bucket-lists, and each bucket-list has many activities. An activity is the goal itself.
I had no idea how to go about this before.
As any other dev would do, I Googled the solution and tada! Google has no helpful answers, for the first time. All there is is flask with database. That will lead you down a path you don’t want to follow.
And don’t worry, the guys at Andela knew you would Google this. Roll up your sleeves and begin work. You Own Your Own learning from now on-wards. And you’ve got plenty to learn before you build something meaningful.
But hey, the time is also set. You don’t have all the time in the world to sit, make some cups of coffee and invite some of your friends to brainstorm how you are going to dissect this.
You’ve got less than five days and all there is is to hit the ground running.
You quickly develop the UI and setup flask and within no time your hello_world.py is running. Hmm, I see you are running at cruising speeds and maximum altitude, take care, you’ll face some bad blockers you’ll think only C can solve.
But wait, you are yet to code bare metal, kinda like what guys that develop frameworks and libraries do. That is when you’ll know how to be thankful for open source libraries and frameworks.
I reached this stage and wondered whether I was still programming in python or c++. In any way, it was still pretty darn low level Python — if such a thing exists.
As you still struggle with your low level code, your learning facilitator reminds you to stick to pep8 standards. What even is that?
Well, it appears all programming languages have a set of rules that gives a guided and preferred convention for writing code in that language.
One thing that informed this standard for Python is that ‘Readability counts’. So most of the standards actually revolve around this one, that is for Python. Leave alone the zigzagging code of Javascript. I didn’t mean those.
You are also highly expected to unblock your friends whenever they get stuck. Or to share a link to a good tutorial you found. This is actually good, as it means you can also ask, and be unblocked too.
One thing learnt and appreciated in the process is that you will need to bury yourself deep into your code and understand how the internals of your code work, how they relate, and how variables get passed from one place to another. Sort of how an architect, after designing a hundred storey building, sits back and analyzes his work from the ground up. From the first brick stone to the last roof bolt/rivet.
I pose a challenge, if you really want to up your programming skills understanding of code, throw away that database and build something you like from the ground up. You won’t regret this challenge as it will only solidify your coding skills and understanding of data structures and algorithms.
And before you go, why don’t you select your favorite music and code on it? Mine was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6OrxxyHHCI, and I played on repeat mode. It is playing now.
This has been my boot-camp experience so far.
