Andela Developer Wins Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional Award

Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional or ‘MVP’ award is a coveted honor given to a few thousand global technology experts across the world on an annual basis. The award is not only based on a technologist’s expertise in their respective category, but also by their contributions to the community through open source activity, and forum posts. Above all, those chosen for the award demonstrate an unwavering passion for their craft, and have an insatiable thirst for technology.We are excited to announce that after four years of endless work with the .NET platform, Andela Developer Toni Solarin-Sodara has been awarded the MVP award in the category of Visual Studio and Development Technologies! This has been a long time coming for Toni, who first fell in love with Microsoft as a very young child, after his Grandma who was also a software developer, introduced him to the technology. At the age of 17 he was looking for a way to seriously begin his software development journey, and so he entered into Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a global competition where thousands of students from around the world compete to develop applications that could change the world with technology. By attending this competition, he quickly garnered attention from Microsoft to which they named him a Microsoft Student Partner. This empowerment he felt from the community inspired him to hone his skills in .NET. Fast forward four years, and Toni’s persistence and grit has been validated with this award.Toni is the only MVP in West Africa in his category, and the first in six years. “I am so honored to received this award,” said Toni, “it’s massive validation for all my hard work, and I can’t believe it finally paid off.”Next March, Microsoft has invited all their MVP’s from around the world to their headquarters in Redmond, WA, for the Global MVP Summit, which Toni will be attending. To learn more about how you can work with rockstar developers like Toni, click here!