HOW I ADAPTED AT THE ANDELA BOOTCAMP

Oare Arene
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

“When it rains, it pours.” — English Idiom (Source unknown)

Sometimes, words never really mean much to us until reality strikes, leaving us reeling in its wake. Last week, I truly could relate with the quote above.

My bootcamp experience has been a tale of awesome highs, wonderful moments garnished with the excitement that knowledge acquisition brings. But then, the lows have been just as remarkable.

I started the bootcamp last week, full of enthusiasm, and high on motivation. The Self-Learning Clinic was awesome, and the chance to meet new people, refreshing. However, nothing could have prepared me for the surprise our power distribution company had in store.

A week before, I had enjoyed near-constant electricity, but all that was to end the day after the bootcamp started. I cannot begin to describe the agony of watching time fly as minutes turned into hours and ate its way towards deadlines with the appetite of starved lions.

There were times I wondered if Murphy was right.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong — Murphy’s Law

Excuses are just what they are — excuses, poor substitutes for real results. Results were expected, not excuses, and so I had to look for ways to deliver. I had bought a few unnecessary things before in my life, but none had felt so satisfying as paying for internet access once when I did not need it, just so I could plug my laptop after the owner of a business cafe had insisted it could not be otherwise.

A few hours later, my laptop had drained again. I had to do something I had never dared before, write code, write tests, and push to github, all from my phone. Yeah, I had known Termux for some time, but I had not really ventured that far with it, and boy did it deliver!

Perhaps the biggest challenge of the bootcamp so far has been adapting to the database we were expected to use. The documentation, though great, is not nearly as detailed as I would have liked. That meant extra hours spent searching Stackoverflow and similar sites, and that meant sleepless nights.

It has not been easy, but it has been worth the effort. Thanks to my determination to churn out results and not excuses, I have learnt to adapt. Challenge One turned out better than I thought it would, during those moments when I wondered how I would manage to get by; those moments when it seemed blockers would not stop pouring.

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