Crowdsourced Learning: Faith Ng'etich's Developer Journey

How One Tech Meet-up Turned This Developer into a Public Speaker

Learn how a Django meet-up during university led Andela developer Faith Ng'etich to learn programming, build tech communities, and ultimately travel to San Francisco to speak at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco, the largest professional conference in the world for LGBTQ+ techies and their allies.

Meet Faith Ng’etich

Faith Ng'etich is a software developer, public speaker and community builder based in Nairobi, Kenya. In her two years at Andela, Faith has built an impressive resume. She is a coach with Rails Girls, former community lead of the Nairobi chapter of AnitaB, and member and advocate of Agile Ventures, an open source community. She's delivered talks on crowdsourced learning and software development at the African Women in Tech conference. All of this, while working full-time with U.S.-based tech companies.

Pathway to Programming

Faith never anticipated becoming a software developer. During university, her interest was piqued by a course in a statistical programming language (R). She began attending coding meet-ups from there, and soon learned about Andela. She did not consider herself a developer, and questioned her ability to get into the highly competitive program. Despite her self-doubt, she began the extensive application and interview process in 2017, and got in on the first try.

Silicon Savannah to Silicon Valley

Fast forward a few years -- this month, Faith will add to her list of accomplishments by speaking at the 2019 Lesbians Who Tech Summit. In her talk, Crowdsourced Learning in Distributed Teams, she will give insights into how she leveraged an expansive range of collaborative learning resources to build her career. She says, “I’ve always learned best in teams. In the open source community, individual contributions are critical, but working together to build skills has been a critical part of my career development.”Speaking at LWT means a great deal to someone who has been involved in tech communities from many angles - coach and mentor, speaker and listener, teacher and learner. While she doesn't identify as LGBTQ herself, Faith says, “Inclusive communities are what brought me to my career and to Andela, so I want to help create that environment for others.”Come learn more about Faith, her journey, and her experiences learning in a distributed team at 3:00 pm on Friday, March 1st. Connect with us on Twitter - @andela or find us at the conference here. We can’t wait!At Andela, we've developed a framework to assess talent. This framework has allowed us to select 1,100 developers from a pool of over 100,000 applicants. Beyond technical ability, our developers possess traits like learning velocity and grit, and team skills such as collaboration, and problem-solving. Looking for developers like this? Let us help!