I am borrowing these values for a life time

Day one at Andela Bootcamp Kigali, we covered various topics but I was mostly impressed by the Andela EPIC values. Get me right, when I say EPIC I don’t mean a long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the past history of a nation nor an exceptionally long and arduous task or activity. NOT AT ALL.

Andela has a set of values that can be summarized as Excellence Passion Integrity and Collaboration. Isn’t that just amazing? With my experience I had never met a company that sets itself apart from the rest by just creating a standard that everyone wants to be part of! These values will not make sense to you if you don’t open your mind to try and understand them trust me once you do … there are guiding principles that you will even use in your daily life.

The EPIC values taught me to always seek excellence, align my work with recommended standards and if you are stuck learn to ask for help. From my last blog, I talked about how hard it was to learn coding but with Passion I did not give up because I believed that even the code I would write will end up impacting the community starting with my peers at the bootcamp.

Something very important for Andela and for every other company is Integrity. Before bootcamp I had never considered that copying a piece of text from the internet and using it in my writing was lack of integrity…. YES IT IS. ask yourself, how many times have you credited your texts, code, designs? Look at all your documents or code files how many comments are there about the source of your code or quotes etc…? That is lack of integrity. This should be the morale with all of us, not only at ANDELA but in our daily life, respect and protection of privacy, learning from mistakes to become better, committing to consistent improvement, preventing harassment, discrimination, abuses and all.

Most companies when they are hiring it’s COMPETITION!!!! Well at Andela it’s not. The EPIC Value encourages aspiring fellows to Collaborate, even on the bootcamp project, ask your peer , help your peer. That is the way around here. No man is an island and working together makes the work clean, simple and fast.

With commitment, these values make you the bonus pater familias a model of the modern society,