The first step towards Andelan glory

Arthur Thungu
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Many are the times that we find ourselves faced with new and sometimes scary experiences. Daunting as they may be though, I feel the best way to go about overcoming said challenges, is to face them head on. Take the bull by the horns, if you will.

Today started out just like any other day — staring at my laptop screen trying to sort out some bug being spewed out in the console log. I was at my wit’s end almost tearing my hair out when I decided, “Hey, let me check out the Andela challenge document.”. For those of that have read the document, you can attest to it not being as “friendly” as one might assume, especially if you are not used to all the technical jargon going on in there.

I started working on the first challenge, pumping myself up like, “You can do this Dante. You’ve survived a freaking apocalypse while fighting endless hordes of zombies. This is nothing.”. So I got to it. Embarked on the epic journey that was research. To my surprise, most of the things weren’t as hard as I had initially assumed, and the research material provided proved to be quite the ally.

At around 10:00, I engaged in a google hangouts call that was scheduled to take place at that time. I really had fun getting to know all the guys in my team. We were briefed on what was expected of us, all the do’s and don’ts and basically everything we needed to progress smoothly through the boot camp. I’ll admit that I missed a few points here and there, but that can mostly be attributed to the internet “troubles” I was experiencing. In any case, I got clarification through the Slack group.

I spent the remaining hours trying to familiarize myself with all the technicalities involved in using the tools recommended and trying to familiarize myself with some of the libraries that I would later use during development. Some of them did prove to be quite challenging (I’m looking at you Pivotal Tracker.). Before I know it, it’s 10 minutes the appointed deadline and at this point, it dawns on me that time is not on my side. “I wonder if they ever managed to build a time machine. I could really use one right about now.”.

To wrap all this up, I can comfortably say that I have been pushed to my limit. I had an epiphany of sorts and realized that I really needed to work on my time management skills. I can tell just from today that I’m in for a really fun ride here at Andela. Pushing and challenging myself really gets me amped. I look forward to the remainder of the week.

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Arthur Thungu

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