My boot camp LFA and my teammates

The Andela boot camp is a two weeks simulated development sprint. Its the final stage in the hiring process of Andela software developers. The two weeks comprise one week of home-based self-learning and one week of product development on-site at an Andela campus. During the boot camp, you are given challenges that lead you to acquire skills needed to build a functional web application while continuously being assessed. The boot camp is led by a Learning Facilitator (LF) who is a senior developer at Andela. The LF is assisted by Andela Fellows who are termed as Learning Facilitator Assistants (LFAs).

On the first day of boot camp, we were split into teams each with an LFA that is directly in charge of it and monitors the progress of the members of that team. So, I was placed in a team of 5 and our LFA is Kasulani Emmanuel. Kasulani struck me as a tough person and I thought he would be a very tight team leader but as I got to interact with him, he was surprisingly a chilled person. I can not really speak to other attributes that he might have as we have not really interacted in person very much. He is a very kind person I might add.

In my team, we are four guys and one “lady” (i almost called her a girl :-) ). The pips (please allow me to use pips) are quite very interesting and I might add awesome as well. They are very collaborative and helpful. They are not very experienced developers just like myself but can at least make some damage when given a computer. The challenge we are working on currently is tight though. None of us had ever tried it. So there are these moments when some of the pips just sit there taking minutes while thinking of what to do.

The journey into the two weeks is still young but I have already learned quite a lot. The challenge we are working on seemed overwhelming at first but it seems doable and achievable by the deadline now