Introducing the 1st Cohort of Interswitch’s Developer Academy

Welcome to 2019!

2018 was great but 2019 is about to blow your minds. At least we intend to on this side of the world. You have your new year resolutions, well here is ours; This year, we are going to put out really interesting articles for your consumption and our mutual satisfaction. 🙂. Can’t wait? Neither can we. So let’s get on with the first of the lot.

In a bid to grow more talent while creating more opportunities in Software Engineering, we recently opened our doors to the first cohort of Software Engineering interns/students into the Interswitch Developer Academy. After an intense screening exercise, 19 students were selected from over a 100+ applicants after displaying intelligence, a degree of technical competence and growth potentials in the Engineering field.

We choose to start the developer academy as we realized there was a growing passion for Software Engineering within the community, with very few onsite training to equip young talents with the required technical knowledge to build quality software, as our past interactions with emerging talents in technology have also proven that technical knowledge is well distributed amongst all career fields asides Software Engineering/Development.

Our screening exercises consisted of written tests in form of solving algorithmic challenges with any of the applicants’ favorite languages and an oral interview with the Chief Information Officer : Babafemi Ogungbamila. This was to help get an idea of each applicant’s ability, weakness and expectations from the academy.

“The screening was okay at every stage. It tested my critical thinking and experience, and emphasis was on logic.” — Odebode Victor, Developer Academy Student

To drive in more activity and intense growth, our classes were targeted at introducing the participants to technical concepts, languages, technology frameworks commonly used by our Software Engineers in different teams within our Engineering group. The courses were broken down to fit into the learning phases and were facilitated by our Engineering Managers and other Senior Engineers to ensure the students benefited the most from the years of experience garnered by our Engineering teams so far.

Our curriculum, while designed to help each student match up to expectations, also comes with periodic evaluations where all students take written tests, fix bugs and build projects with knowledge gained from each course. Some of which include:

• Software architectural design patterns,
• Distributed systems
• Database design
• ASP.NET,
• Java EE
• Spring
• Mobile app development and many more.

All academy classes are based on the Challenge Based Learning (CBL), a multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning. CBL is collaborative and hands-on, with facilitators encouraging each student to work with other students in teams, their facilitators, Experts in their communities and around the world to help develop a deeper knowledge of each course taught, accept and solve challenges, take actions and share their experience.

With the third month rolling in and the several evaluation processes carried out, some of the feedback gotten from the students include but absolutely not limited to the following:

“My experience in the academy has been eye opening and enlightening. I’ve been able to discover that being a Software Engineer isn’t about writing millions of code but about solving problems in the simplest and most efficient way through programming” — Mayowa Dabiri

“I have learnt a lot about industry standards, best practices and core topics that every Developer looking to roll out the best products and services should know.” — Agboola Emmanuel

While also taking classes, we identified the need to put to test new learning on real projects and teams. One of the ways we solved this was having all the students participate and get insights into some of our Engineering culture and activities within our Engineering team, some of which included participating in a single day Scrum meeting, attending the 2018 grand finale of our Mind the Engineering Friday (MTEF) program. The MTEF is an engagement and culture building activity which happens every Friday of the week involving all Engineering team members randomly placed in diverse teams to take on and tackle live Engineering problems/bugs on our products and services.

“The MTEF event was a real eye opener for me. I got to see how real time issues around production and other tech got resolved through awesome, analytical environments and methods by brilliant champs in several groups. The most amazing one for me was the presentation from a team who, through their amazing work, made real-time settlements a reality. Thumbs up!” — Ayowole Adenuga

“It was an awesome experience as Software Engineers talked about new technologies and the problems they could solve in the tech space. I learnt how important it is to always innovate and sought new ways to optimize legacy codes for software to be of high performance at all time.” — Mefendja Chinedu

“A very thrilling experience, I was exposed to a lot of technologies and architectures used in developing real-time solutions. The development teams involved were faced with very challenging problems in which the most part dealt with legacy code but with their vast experience, most of them were able to provide stable solutions.” — Stephen Enunwah

“As a young developer, I was exposed to state-of-the-art architectures, technologies and best practices, it was a great privilege to see how Interswitch uses technology to build innovations that drive the payment space in Nigeria and beyond.” — Abidoye Victor

After the first 3-months of intensive learning in the academy, successful students who get to scale through the final evaluation tasks would be fully welcomed into our diverse Engineering teams for a 3-month internship program where they would be assigned to varying projects and continue their learning while progressing in their chosen development track.

To follow our academy activities and growth of our students, do follow our Engineering handle on Twitter: @interswitchengr for updates until our final day.

Happy New Year! And may the rest of the year be better than we hope it is.