THE ANDELA EFFECT.

Hi, my name is Lule Herman, am nineteen by the time am writing this. Am a short fat baby-faced boy so people tend to get surprised by the things I do or say, some laugh, and it’s ok because I look like a joke, but am not. I began teaching myself computer programming when I was 14 after dropping out of school and am loving it more each day.

I recently came across a post about Andela, a technology firm sourcing top 1 percent developers in Africa, they say they will pay you to learn to code. They are always hiring and it was Cohort 9 when I learned about them. I looked through the application process and the requirements, to my rescue there was nothing stopping me from applying, and I did.

The second time I made it into the boot camp, this is a two week coding fever, not a picnic. I arrived on the first day, I headed up to the cafeteria on the fourth floor and found most of my fellow boot campers already seated. I grabbed breakfast, found myself a sit, on the other side of the table was this guy named Timothy with whom I became acquainted. He is a very talkative guy and he was asking everyone around him our progress on the Andela developer challenge. Later he said it was good to know someone was struggling like him, that’s the reason he was asking. He helped reduce my fear of being around many people.

We spent the next three days of boot camp week 1 working remoted on the challenges. The second day on site was the judgment day. We had to present our codes to our respective LFAs and then wait for the email inviting us to the next boot camp week. Although I did not make it to the second week, am not at all bothered by that. Why? First, because I have applied again and will keep on doing it for as many times as needed to get into Andela. Second, it was no surprise, like, I was not that good compared to Andela standards.

For the first time in my life I felt a sense of belonging, sitting in that boardroom, each on their computers, sharing tech tricks, small talk, very calm environment, it feels so good. We did warm ups each morning after breakfast, now sometimes I find myself lost in the moment, trying to do that childish stuff we were doing, am I going crazy or what.

Me with Git/Github

I had always known GitHub as some place of good Samaritans offering free pieces of code to the public, that was all, and I never even dreamt of me putting my code out there. While in the boot camp, it was one of the requirements, something you just must do, and very well by the way. Things like creating branches, merge afterward, descriptive commit messages, etc got me like “Why don’t I just write my codes once and push to GitHub? Why all the trouble ?”. But when I started embracing GIT, I came to know that it’s a very useful tool. I fully understood why It exists when I lost my important source code in the process of uninstalling the IDE I was working from. I will do the project again but first start a git repository for it, have learned my lesson, thanks to Andela, otherwise, it would be doing it all over again and store copies of the code in different locations.

Have learned a lot since I came to know of Andela but I know you don’t have all day reading my post so let me summarize it all in one statement.
“Andela has made me feel like a caveman like I’ve been doing everything the wild way, you know. And it’s shifting my skills from informal to formal, that’s for sure.”
You would also allow me to conclude by saying “TIA”, this is like the “Heil Hitler” of Navis and neo-Nazis for Andelans.