It’s been 4 months coming!

Ibanga Enoobong
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Its been 4 months coming!

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step - Lao Tzu

I originally saw the form for the ALC initiative on Twitter. I applied for the intermediate track but I didn’t hear anything from them for a long while.

One Saturday I saw a missed call from programmer sir Ogunnaike Damilare, I called back we had a good, enlightening conversation about life and career, later when I came online I saw a message from him with a link to the intermediate challenge — an app to show top developers of GitHub in Lagos. The deadline was Monday 😱 I murdered that Sunday building the app and before night fall I had completed all the requirements and was good to go 💪.

After sometime I received a congratulatory mail and an invite to Andela’s slack community where I met with lots of amazing developers 😎

We were on the Udacity Android Developer Fast track program.
A 10 hour per week commitment became 10 hours per day! 😱
I cried, complained, preserved, was stretched 💪

I was granted a 2 week “leave” from my previous employer, took advantage of it to run through the lectures and projects, just on the verge of completing the final project (Stock Hawk), the curriculum was revised 😭 Stock hawk became extracurricular 😱

I was at cross roads, just got a new job but there were no Android projects on ground so I was re-purposed as a Java EE developer 😰 (well Android is based on Java right). I read lines of codes, documentations, learnt about linux servers, Wildfly, Payara, persistence context, Hibernate, EJB, transactions … (I could go on and on 😂) my head basically was spinning, the bugs didn’t stop coming, I dreamed of code daily 😂, I felt I couldn’t take it, even though I had been writing Android apps since 2014, the work load was much and I almost threw in the towel 🤗

Thankfully the ALC grouped us in teams 💪and I was like the team leader, I thought of how disappointing it will be to tell them I had quit 😭

Drive Your Learning

Hold Each Other Accountable

Build Our ALC Community

I also volunteered to facilitate the beginner ALC for the Ikeja region with Philip Okonkwo. I didn’t know how I’d do it, I bet I was the last person to sign up, after all I have a communication challenge, the what ifs kept popping up, I preserved, I was stretched.

Quitters never win and winners never quit

Each meet up was a reason not to quit, seeing the hunger and excitement in their faces from the once in a live time opportunity presented to them, fueled me to preserve. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I made new friends, I inspired people, they inspired me, they became my motivation 💪.

Awesome learners with Philip and I

Philip also was my motivation, I started calling him Moses, beckoning on him to lead us to the promise land 😂. Inspite of his office work he completed the 4 projects before time and was (is) itching for more 💪. He was also the first in the community to get certified 🎓

I started my exam on the 15th of July 2017 by 9:44am. I hadn’t taken an official exam since I left school, so as usual I had to deal with sweaty palms and flushed face as the time drew near 😂. I had done my research on what to expect during the exam, the only thing I didn’t have much experience in was writing tests ( both unit and espresso) mostly because as a self taught developer it never popped up in any tutorial I took 🤔.

The week before I went through the Android testing codelab and vogella’s on Espresso piece to brush up my skills.

I was able to complete the exam in less that 24 hours (sleeping and transit included) . Shout out to @MyCafeNand the awesome barrister for hosting me for the period. The café latte and smell of coffee gave laser focus

I must commend Udacity and Google for the nature of the exam, they really have an understanding of what education should be and how to make software developers productive. I expected to have to ticking clock showing how many hours were left but that will only bring unnecessary anxiety also the detailed requirements, UI mockups, QA feedback really made it easy to understand and complete the tasks easily.

Finally my heartfelt appreciation to Andela Nigeria, in keeping up with their commitment to train 100,000 developers across Africa over the next 10 years, the impact of the ALC will be forever felt 💙

ALC 5.o Meet up! Thanks so much for the power bank :)
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