A Butcher and a Missionary

Some 55 years ago, in Kwara State, Nigeria, a butcher had a son. Around the same time, a missionary in the Northern part of Nigeria had a daughter. Both children were born into low-income families.

The butcher’s son attended Victory Comprehensive Secondary School- an educational institution, built selflessly in the public’s interest, that provided quality yet affordable education for local residents. He went on to lead peace efforts to quell unrest in the Niger Delta region and preach the Gospel all over the South-South for many years.

In the North, the government had created a program to pick up young girls out on streets and send them to a Shekarau Girls Boarding School. It was at this boarding school the missionary’s daughter received her secondary education. The program, borne out of the communal belief in educating the girl child’s, made sure that all the resources they needed were provided for them as they learned.

The boy and girl met each other at Kwara College of Technology (now Kwara Poly) and then went on to University of Ilorin, got married and became the parents of my friend, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who has founded two fast-growing startups, Andela, and Flutterwave, and continues to dedicate himself to building the future of Nigeria.

The Current State of Nigeria

We are about 200 million people, with 45% of us under the age of twenty-five. Our youth are talented and hardworking, but they are also disenchanted because our country has failed to provide them with the opportunities to convert their brilliance into a desirable quality of life. This disillusionment has contributed to selfish quests for survival, and so it’s not surprising that many are migrating to countries like Canada, Germany, and the UK.

What would be the fate of the butchers’ sons and the missionaries’ daughters in 2018 Nigeria?

Their fate will be the future of Nigeria. Thirty-two years from now, in the year 2050, Nigeria will be the 3rd most populous nation in the world., and 60% of us will be younger than thirty-five years old.

Birthday Wishes

I wish that Nigeria prospers.

I wish that Nigerians in all facets of society act in the public interest of our communities.

I wish that strong, selfless, ethical, wise leaders emerge and pave the way for a thriving Nigerian reality with healthy, and happy citizens.

I wish that Nigeria becomes a country where its citizens live by our national pledge:

I pledge to Nigeria, my country; to be faithful, loyal, and honest
To serve Nigeria with all my strength; to defend her unity
And uphold her honor and glory; so help me God.

Happy 58th Birthday, Nigeria! was originally published in Nigeria is Beautiful on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I will never forget.

On May 21, 2014, I took the most YOLO step I’ve ever taken in my life.

Jeremy, Christina, E, Ian, and Brice (insane team; love them to death) convinced me to hop on a one-way flight to Lagos from Toronto to recruit and train the first set of Andela developers.

For a month prior to that, we had been brainstorming non-stop of how to write the future of technology in Africa by rapidly upskilling brilliant Africans in software development. Someone had to go and do the actual upskilling.

And just like that, in the middle of brainstorming, Jeremy was like “okay, Ian buy the ticket”. I was like “right now!? just like that!?”. They casually laughed as they bought the one-way ticket to Lagos. You can guess my reaction, “YOLO *¯\_(ツ)_/¯*, OSHEY”.

On the plane back, I was amusing myself remembering that on May 21, 2007, I left my home in Bayelsa, Nigeria to go study in Canada. And exactly 7 years after, May 21, 2014, I was on a plane back to Nigeria.

I laughed at what my spiritual friends would say. After all, 7 is supposed to be the perfect number of destiny.

With all the opportunities I had around me to build software at the highest levels, I had ZERO intentions of moving back to Nigeria. But here I was, casually walking into a terrain that I have never experienced or intended to experience.

I thought about what I was going to do when I got to Nigeria. And it hit me:

“Up until now, I have had countless opportunities to build a solid life for myself through building technology. Those opportunities will never go away. Now it’s time for me to create similar opportunities for my people.”

I immediately felt super-jazzed! Like hell yeah! Let’s do this! It’s just Lagos right? No big deal.

First Impressions

I landed on Saturday, got settled in.

A few days later, E started taking me around Lagos to meet some players in the ecosystem. I met very cool people. Loved the energy. I remember the BBQ chicken at the CChub Games Day that made me swear a life-long commitment to BBQ chicken.

Despite all the cool people I met, I couldn’t help but be unhappy and borderline pissed about the perception of developers. I did not feel that developers got the recognition and respect they deserved for their work and contribution to society. I made a determined decision to change that.

Inviting People to Change What’s Possible

After 3 days of meeting people, and attempting to get acclimated without any success, it was time to start interviewing candidates for the Fellowship.

In all the interviews, there were 2 questions I always asked at the end:

1) If a doctor, lawyer, oil engineer, and a developer walk into a bar, who do you think would get the most respect and the least respect?

2) How much would you like to earn as a software developer?

For #1, most people consistently said the developer would get the least respect. After all, nobody even knows what a developer is. My response to that was that “Where I’m coming from, the developers get a lot of respect. And I can bet you that in the next few years, the developers here would have the respect and all the swag”

For #2, many candidates seemed afraid to mention large numbers. The most I can recall was N250,000/month. And this was after I pushed them numerous times to be more ambitious. I ended up telling them “It doesn’t matter what you want, you’ll be able to earn that in a few years as a developer”.

I’m sure a lot of the candidates were thinking, “who’s this mad man?” And they were not wrong. Afterall, I did not have any data to back up my claims. I was a 23-year old that only graduated from the University of Waterloo a year prior to that. What did I know about life?

All I had was raw passion and a burning desire to show people that they had the power and ability to change what they previously thought was possible. And through that work, they’d be able to build whatever lives they wanted for themselves.

And sometimes, all you need to get started is that passion to create what you want to see in the world. Little did I know.

The Ball Of Impact is Rolling

Fast forward 3 years later.

Andela has over 300 developers building software for technology companies around the world.

There are now thriving developer communities in Nairobi and Lagos (forLoopNigeria alone has 1,295 participants and has spread to Nairobi).

There’s even an article about how Nigerian developers are the new rockstars and compared them to artists under the Mo’hits Records label.

Andela developers that have been at Andela for at least 2.5 years earn at least 4x what they did in their first month at the company, and consistently receive offers from tech companies that are 3–5x what Andela pays them. They stay because they are committed to our mission of creating opportunities for people after them just like I did.

Because of the work, they’ve been doing, we’ve been able to expand our reach to Kampala, Uganda.

So Yea Why am I Still All In On Andela?

Because we are only just starting to scratch the surface.

Because we understand that the way to truly transform a nation is through innovation.

And in this age of technology, innovation goes where the developers go.

Imagine an Africa where every city has thousands of top-tier developers. That would literally transform our continent as we know it. From big businesses that change the we way operate as a society, to government policies, to contributing to the evolution of the human race globally through technology. The possibilities are endless.

We must continue to distribute opportunities for Africans to learn and grow as technology leaders. And I’m committed to doing the work that enables that for as long as it takes for Africa to take her place in the global technology revolution. #BuildTheFuture

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Background

Every month, Andela accepts at least forty new developers into our developer Fellowship. The Fellowship kicks off with a series of immersive learning experiences focused on technical and professional skills designed and facilitated by our Learning team (which I’m part of).

As you can already figure, managing the flow of developers through our pipeline of programs all the way to when they start building products for our clients is a critical business function. That challenge proves to be more critical as we prepare to scale to other countries.

From the beginning, we had used spreadsheets to manage our pipeline. It was becoming tedious to manage all the data and transitions.

So a few months ago, my 10x team of software engineers turned Learning Facilitators took three days off to hack on a tool to upgrade our solution.

Man, I was stoked! Time to whip out my engineering chops for three days straight without any interruptions from other managerial or business operational responsibilities.

Mistakes Were Made

We decided to build a web app with a decoupled client and server architecture. Simple enough.

We were in explore mode, so we did not put much thought into what technologies we wanted to use to build the app. The front-end team agreed to use React.js because that’s the new hotness in the javascript labyrinth of frameworks. Backend peeps decided to use Flask since they were all proficient in Python plus Flask is a lightweight framework. Nothing to fear here.

After some hours of spec’ing out APIs and wireframes, and initial implementations, it was time to set up our deployment to start seeing how the app was coming together. Makes sense.

One of the front-end team members suggested we deploy the client on DigitalOcean. My response was “yeah that makes sense but would take extra time to configure. Let’s just use Heroku since it’s very simple and this is a hackathon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. No big deal.

The Constraints

If I was going to deploy the client and server on Heroku, I had two options:

1. Deploy client and server as two separate Heroku applications
2. Deploy client and server on the same Heroku application but use two dynos

Challenge with Option #1: The code for client and server lived in the same repository.

How’s that a challenge? Let’s go back to how Heroku does deployment out of the box.

Heroku has a buildpack module that sets up your dyno’s environment by installing all the necessary dependencies before running your server. It runs a dependency file detection engine through your project’s root directory to decide on what buildpack to use. E.g if it sees a requirements.txt file, it knows to use the Python buildpack, or if it sees a package.json file, it knows to use the Node.js buildpack.

Our project directory looked like this:

root
├── client
│   ├── src
│   └── package.json
├── server
│   ├── app.py
│   └── requirements.txt
└── README.md

No dependency file in root directory => no buildpack => no deployment. If we wanted to force a deployment anyways, we could just push the sub-directories using git’s subtree module:

git subtree push --prefix pythonapp heroku master

YOLO!

As an avid practitioner of the YOLO way, I know that all things YOLO come with a caveat. So I thought, “well if we deployed the client and server as two separate applications, we’d have to manage two deployment pipelines, and this is just a hackathon. Ain’t nobody got time fo dat”. So I jumped to Option #2; deploy client and server on the same application and use two dynos.

Challenge with Option #2: Heroku’s free plan only gives you 512 RAM with one web dyno and one worker dyno. You need another web dyno? Upgrade to a paid plan. Ain’t nobody got money fo dat in a hackathon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I investigated deploying either the client or the server as a worker, but workers cannot be exposed on ports. You can’t expose workers on ports using Heroku :(

Option #1 beckoned me with open arms. “Nope!”

Then I had one of those brain sparks that you should never listen to:

So I made Option #3

Option #3: Figure out how to deploy two web servers on one Heroku Dyno.

One of the first results after doing a Google search was this Quora post where the OP was trying to achieve what I wanted. He concluded that there was no solution, and ended up with my Option #1. This was my cue to give up. But no. What kind of Nad gives up just because there are no answers on Quora and StackOverflow? Not this limitless Nad!

I resumed my quest by thinking deeply about how Heroku triggers and manages deployments.

It’s important to know that most of the events in this process are automatic. The only step that requires a user’s input is the Procfile step since Heroku executes whatever instruction a user enters in it. This was my in!

In the past, I had used Foreman to manage server processes. Foreman is a Ruby library that allows you to declare the processes that are necessary in order to run your app in a file called a Procfile. Looks familiar to my current problem!

All I needed to do was trick Heroku into thinking I was deploying a Ruby app, then tell it to run Foreman in the default Procfile, then Foreman will run my actual Procfile containing the startup instruction for the client and web servers. Win!

I quickly realized that on this dyno I would have Ruby, Python, and Node dependencies. Not good.

I prayed to the gods of open source via Google, and they showed me that Foreman had ports in different languages, including a Python port called Honcho.

With Honcho, I was set.

I modified the root directory to look like:

root
├── client
│   ├── src
│   └── package.json
├── server
│   ├── app.py
│   └── requirements.txt
├── requirements.txt
├── Procfile
├── ProcfileHoncho
└── README.md

With the new directory structure and files, here’s how Heroku behaves:

1. Heroku sees requirements.txt and uses the Python buildpack to set up a Python environment.
2. Using the buildpack, Heroku installs the dependencies in the requirements => Honcho.
3. Heroku runs its Procfile which basically just tells Honcho to run using the ProcfileHoncho file
4. Honcho runs the node process to fire up the node client server, then runs the python process to fire up the python server!

I’m feeling pretty good at this point until I try deploying again only to realize that my node and python servers are inaccessible.

Redemption

After reading the logs line-by-line, I figured that the node and python servers were being exposed on random ports. To fix that and make the port assignments deterministic, I set the NODE_ENV environment variable on Heroku to 5000 (you can use whatever number you want). I set the python server to always be exposed on port 1337 by appending -b 0.0.0.0:1337 to the end of the second line in ProcfileHoncho.

I try deploying again, and boom! I had the client and server running on one Heroku dyno! Profit!

I looked at the time; 6 am. I had spent way too much time bending the rules just to satisfy my curiosity.

Lesson learned: if it does not feel natural, forcing it would cause you pain. But, if you follow the white rabbit, you may discover something cool.

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Africa’s momentum, combined with the current digital era, suggests that Africa could leapfrog all other continents by solving many of our problems with technology.

But on our current path, this prosperous future is elusive. Right now, we just do not have the technical manpower to support Africa’s technological revolution at scale.

Enter Africa4Tech

Africa4Tech is an organization aimed at convening African leaders in Education, Agriculture, Energy, and Health to solve Africa’s problems in each of these sectors, through technology.

I attended the first edition of the Africa4Tech conference in Marrakech, Morocco, to represent Andela as a speaker and expert in TechEd. Each of the four industries (Education, Agriculture, Energy, and Health) had three workshops with specific problems to solve, and each attendee participated in a workshop. The end goal was to create three technology solutions in each of the four sectors for a total of twelve continent-shifting solutions to critical problems.

I participated in a workshop on building an effective funding model for EdTech businesses. We built a prototype virtual accelerator called Nellie that provides a financial modelling AI, an advisory network, and a funding network. Users (EdTech entrepreneurs) can repeatedly tweak their business model based on feedback from the AI until it becomes a viable business model, and then they get access to an advisory network that supports them with a checklist that measures investor-readiness. At that point, they’d have access to Africa4Tech’s EdTech fund and other investors who piggyback off our business verification process. Cool eh!?

In addition to the eleven other solutions of equal or greater complexity, there were “Young Innovators” from thirty-two countries who showcased their inventions to the community. Some of the solutions I recall are:

• A 3D printer made from e-waste
• A smart bag that charges your laptop with solar energy
• A mobile app to support mothers raising their infants
• A fish tank that grows food produce with the aqua-waste

Being the learning science practitioner that I am, at the end of every long day of speaking, workshopping, and interacting with the young innovators, I took time to reflect on my learnings and how I’m contributing with my work.

Africa’s population is growing rapidly and is projected to be at 2.5 billion by 2050.

Eventually, all these technology-enabled solutions would need to scale to serve the continent. But if we don’t have the technical manpower, then how can we possibly create a wide number of solutions, or scale them to reach billions?

Enter Andela

Andela extends engineering teams with world-class technical talent (i.e., software developers, DevOps engineers, etc), and aims to empower 100,000 technology leaders across Africa over the next 10 years. We deeply believe that though the digital revolution may have begun in Silicon Valley, its future will be written in Lagos, Nairobi and cities across Africa.

After the Africa4Tech conference, I’m going to add Marrakesh to that list. I’m truly inspired and energized by what I saw, who I met, and how much I learned there.

I’m happy to continue participating in the global conversation of how we can usher in Africa’s digital economy era.

Want to build up the conversation of powering Africa’s technology revolution, comment, recommend by clicking the💚 below so other people will see this here on Medium.

Who Will Power Africa’s Technology Revolution? was originally published in Initiate on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sometime in April last year at a company offsite event, I was going on one of my freestyle-instigating bants when, somehow, I publicly declared that I was going to drop a mixtape.

“When is it dropping?” someone shouted. Without thinking, I yelled back, “December 25th! Find it in your Christmas stocking yo!” I quickly realised that I had set myself up.

From that day onwards, folks kept asking me how the mixtape production was going.

“It’s coming together,” I responded, even though I had nothing. Matter of fact, I didn’t even know how to rap, and we were talking about making a mixtape here! I knew I had to do something to learn it.

“There’s no way Lil Wayne was born knowing how to rap,” I thought to myself. “He had to have learnt it somehow.”

I finally started in October. First step was collecting instrumentals and themes. I selected a few beats from some artists I like: Kanye West, J. Cole, Rick Ross. Next step was to write something down. I picked the first track, “Here I Am” by Rick Ross, and played the original over and over again while reading the lyrics off Rap Genius.

“Hey, you’re not trying to win a Grammy here,” I told myself. “If you can’t write lyrics or you don’t have flow, why not learn the original lyrics, replace the words with your own message, and keep the same flow?”

And that’s exactly what I did. I recorded it and shipped to my friend Tomi ‘Caps’ Ajayi, who is a hobbyist blogger and rapper in Toronto.

Tomi responded a day later with some specific feedback. I continued to improve and send him updates more actionable feedback.

A week later, I was gifted an online rap course via Udemy by a friend and colleague, Evan Greenlowe. The instructor emphasized the importance of being relaxed and comfortable, and stressed that ”it does not matter whether you rhyme or not, just keep going.”

Fast forward to November 2015. I was in Nairobi, helping scale Andela’s Kenya operations. I now had five instrumentals, two of which I had written verses for. Three more tracks to go — no recordings, no choruses. It was time to up the ante.

I would get back from work on the nights I did not work late, sit at the dining table, put my headphones on and tell myself, “you’re not leaving this table until you write a verse.” This was painful at first because I wanted to be Kanye West — I could spend up to three hours trying to write two lines. Then I started to recall a powerful piece of advice from my mentor Obie Fernandez, who is also a DJ. We were pair programming on an Andela internal product and I was overthinking some logic and trying to find a perfect bulletproof solution.

Obie’s advice: “Young padawan, perfection is the enemy of good.”

What he meant was, put out something that works because you can always iterate on it. If you spend too much time trying to come up with the perfect solution, you many never deliver anything. (*lightbulb flash*)

I started creating verses one hour per day, because I realised I did not care about being Kanye West in the short run. I could be Kanye by first creating then iterating as my skills improved. By November 30, I had all the verses to the five tracks. 25 days till mixtape drops.

On December 1 I was back in Lagos, Nigeria. With 25 days to go, I still didn’t have any choruses or a studio to record in. Awesome, life is good….not.

But then I realised that I have friends who could help with that — after all, Andela is a massive pool of talent! I immediately pinged Chidi “The Afropolymath” Nnadi and Chidi “TheLexAsh” Ashimole, both fellow Andelans, for help. I knew these fellas could sing for days, and since the spirit of collaboration is strong at Andela, we were writing choruses together in no time.

I called a few studios and realised that they would be too expensive so I decided to learn how to produce by myself. From my experience with Tomi ‘Caps’, I knew that the first I should do was to probably identify someone in my network that had that expertise, so I reached out to my college friend Yat ‘Yatrix’ Choi who I listened to on SoundCloud — he always had a smooth sound and vibe, and he produced his own music.

I sent a new recording out to Yat immediately asking for tips on how to make my music sound better. He gave me specific feedback on how to to compress, reverb, and use delays. The biggest takeaway? “Always less is more with effects.”

I would later use Yat’s feedback on my delivery and flow to iterate on my existing verses (See? Kanye here I come).

After talking with Yat for a while, I bought Logic Pro X, borrowed a real mic from a friend (I was using my Apple headphones mic to do prior recordings [n00b life]), and started recording. I had Chidi record most of the choruses, because collabs are more fun than solo (obv). After recording everything, I put my Yatrix hat on and started applying the effects he had told me about. For the ones that were not too obvious, I looked to the internet for guidance.

By the morning of the 24th I was done mixing, I uploaded the songs to my SoundCloud, and the lyrics to Rap Genius (my lyrics make more sense when you read the meanings).

On December 25, I jumped on Facebook, and posted links. I had successfully learned to rap, produce vocals and released the output as evidence of my learning. Not bad for a beginner eh?

On New Year’s Day, I started thinking about my journey and I understood that all this would have not been possible if I did not:

1. Set a date to release output
2. Have accountability partners (by announcing in public I instantly created 100+ accountability partners)
3. Start doing the damn thing
4. Reach out to the “experts” for feedback and tips
5. Reach out to friends and colleagues for help and support

Now you have an easy framework for learning anything you’re passionate about. In my next post, I’ll be sharing a more scientific and methodical approach for learning effectively and with personal stories of course!

At Andela, I run the training program responsible for building world-class developers. We are a mission with a business which implies that time is not our friend. As a result, we are constantly innovating to reduce or maintain our training times while delivering better outcomes for our trainees. In figuring out how to improve our training, I knew I had to go back to my roots. I found my soul yearning for the computer science concepts that I threw away a long time ago. With this new drive, I began some soul searching.

I wanted to start with Data Structures and Algorithms(cos who doesn’t love those ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) so I started dusting the old books. There are a few of them including CLRS that traumatised me in college. One book stood out though: The Algorithm design Manual by Skienna. Buy and Read that book! Do. It. Now. Seriously, 100% recommend for anyone trying to dive deep into CS again. It is complete with examples and “war stories” describing difficult real world problems that Skienna and his apprentices solved because of their algorithmic abilities. Those stories rekindled my appreciation for CS and the software craft again.

Last Saturday, I had a hard time sleeping and while my mind was wandering, I had an aha moment! “Dude do you think you can implement the sorting algorithms you learned years ago?”. “Psssh easy stuff dawg; wouldn’t even take 30mins” “Okay do it then” “YOLO”

And guess what? I couldn’t do zilch! I was only able to implement merge sort :(

The next morning, I decided to study some sorting algorithms and implement them. And damn it felt good!!

My question to you now is this: How many of you and your CS buddies can implement 5 sorting algorithms for fun today? [Even the ones that are post-development :P]

Here’s a challenge: go to this github repo, fork it, and implement the sorting algorithms there. This is just the beginning; over time, we will build a collection of challenges that span across different fields of CS.

Things you’ve learned long ago can often help increase your performance on a new challenge today. And in recent times, my background in CS has come in very handy. I encourage you to go back to prior knowledge that you’re probably taking for granted and in doing so, you might just have a revelation.

Challenge your friends on twitter with the hashtag #appreciateCS and let’s bring back our love for CS!

Bring The Love for Computer Science Back! was originally published in We’ve moved to freeCodeCamp.org/news on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A lot of companies with a noble mission do not succeed primarily because of one thing: incompetence.

At Andela, our mission is to transform the global technology landscape by connecting top employers with untapped talent around the world by training 100,000 brilliant young people from Africa in the next ten years.
The mission is powerfully backed by beliefs in human brilliance and empowerment, and I have learned that to succeed we must be premium.

What does it take to be premium?

Excellence, Professionalism, Reliability, Extreme Customer Satisfaction, Competence.
We are building world-class developers and problem solvers. That has some implicit correlations to a competency standard.
Outwardly, we must be competent in technical ability, soft skills and ability to communicate effectively, value creation. Inwardly, we must be competent with value creation, and with building each other up.

What has Andela done to foster such a culture?

One word. Empowerment.

We define empowerment as creating an alternate reality or environment where every employee feels safe to be creative, to make choices, and to ask for things that can make themselves and ultimately the community, better.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, if you want to make your company mission successful, you must foster a culture based on competence. Do not be afraid of setting the bar high (after all, we are limitless). Do not stand for anything but the best. In order to do that organically, cultivate an environment of empowerment. Gather your players for the big game. Give them the necessary training, and the tools to train themselves in other things. Let them feel safe to speak up and share their brilliance with you and their colleagues. Let them dare to innovate and try new things. The bar that you have set will ensure that only good tangible outcomes and learning will come out of those. Set the bar high, create an empowering environment, let the spirit of competence take control, and you will see the real power of limitless potential.

I have spent some time sojourning through the seeming wilderness that is software craftsmanship. I use the word “seeming” because it was until I found the oasis of teaching that I really started to find clarity in what software craftsmanship really is, and with those realizations began to find happiness. At some point in every developer’s journey from apprentice to master, she must have an apprentice also. In doing so, one uncovers countless mysteries about themselves that opens more doors on the path to mastery.

These musings of mine are here to help you find that satisfaction, and reach that level of enlightenment through teaching others your craft. Here we go!

Do you like food? No? Lies! We all do! We mostly have a favourite meal and enjoy being treated to a delicacy of some sort at some points in time.
So imagine that delicious meal you love. Smell the beautiful aroma. Taste the warmth and let the flavours tickle your taste buds. Is your mouth watering yet? Good!

Now think about how that dish you love so much was made. Teaching someone how to code is not much different from teaching them how to cook a delicious meal. Some are natural cooks, and others can follow a recipe and end up with the same result. This post aims to give you a recipe to creating a developer full of flavor that will bring satisfaction to the world.

Before we begin cooking, we need a kitchen, utensils, ingredients, and some heat. Same thing applies here! You need a conducive environment, some tools, an apprentice, and yourself!. Yes, you are the heat — stay with me — I will break these down, and bring them together as we go along.

Firstly, a kitchen. To cook a 5-star meal, you need a kitchen that’s 5-star as well. For teaching developers, the parallel is that you need a 5-star environment conducive to coding. Usually, you want a place that is comfortable for you and your apprentice. You also do not want a place that is too quiet; some background noise is good for arousing creative juices. An ideal place is one with comfortable furniture (wide tables, ergonomic chairs), and other working developers (passively observing people building things will encourage your apprentice to get there quicker).

Now the utensils. So you do need some pots, pans, spoons, etc. On the programming side this means you need a computer and an internet connection to take advantage of the global tech community for when you get stuck).

Now the ingredients! This is a very important component. You cannot make onion soup without onions right? In the same vein, you need apprentice with the right ingredients. Through my experience training ~107 developers so far, I can tell you the right ingredients to seek. The apprentice needs to be thirsty for knowledge (intellectual disposition), be flexible towards new experiences (experiential disposition), have grit, and be passionate about her journey of craftsmanship.

Let’s bring the heat! The heat serves as the catalyst that blends all the ingredients in a moderate fashion (without burning or yielding half cooked) to yield a delicious meal. The heat is you. You have to bring all the qualities of your apprentice together in a manner that lets them absorb all your teachings and become one with them. I will give some tips on this matter in my next blog post.