Meeting Andela Fellows and Staff
It’s real. I’m here. I’m at the Andela Boot Camp 16. As I said, when I got here, I learned the programming language of choice was to be JavaScript and not Python. I wanted to know why, so I approached Olumuyiwa Osiname, an easy-going, cordial Andela fellow that is one of the Teaching Assistants (T.A). He’s a Ruby on Rails guru, and joined Andela in November, 2015. “It was actually changed at the last minute. To be specific, it was changed Sunday afternoon [before Boot Camp started on Monday].” We were actually chatting in a public transit bus en route our homes, yet he didn’t think it an inappropriate place for me to ask questions. He even went into details to answer another question “Such changes are normal between fellows and clients, who can change the stack anytime, even when development is nearing completion. The key”, he said “ is to focus on SOLVING a problem itself and abstract oneself as much as possible from the implementation of that solution.”
“There is a reason for this: JavaScript is such a universal language. Back then, it used to be only a front-end language, but we now have Node.js and many other frameworks that work on the back-end.” These are the words of Surajudeen Akande, an alumnus of LAUTECH and who has been an Andela fellow for just shy of a year. He’s loves making people pay attention to in class, and uses various methods to achieve this. Here he was, disseminating information to bunch of us. “What is more, from the start of January till date, we’ve been having requests for apps of ONLY three kinds, those written in Python, JavaScript or for Android.” I guess it’s settled then. If JavaScript is has such a comprehensive use and is in high demand, I think we NEED to study it.
So, the next question is, how does one succeed? How do I hack through the change and succeed at becoming a fellow? “You don’t succeed through Boot Camp because you’re the most technically advanced fellow or you dream in code. No, you don’t, and I know that because that’s not how I did.” Now I’m talking to Rowland Ekemezie, an alumnus of Nnamdi Azikwe University. I asked him what he thought got him into Andela, and he was very cordial with me, taking his time to tell me his success story in detail, and telling me the key points. He told me he didn’t get in because he was the most techy or advanced bootcamper of Sep 2015. “What got me in was no matter what we were told to do, I got it done by the given deadline. That fast analysis and meeting deadlines are the silver bullets that got me in.”
And trust me, I’ll use them too!
