Andela Developer Builds Instant Notification Feature for Reaction Commerce

After being selected to join Andela, developers spend three months in Simulations, working on clones of real open-source projects. The Andela Learning team uses Simulations to level-up developers’ technical and soft skills, preparing them to build real software on teams around the world.The Simulations phase accomplishes this goal by placing Andela Developers in a real agile team environment, where they build real software under realistic business conditions. Cloning the projects ensures that the code bases and features are as real as can be, while still giving the Learning team enough control to tailor the experience to maximize learning.Andela Developer Kolawole Alade’s Simulations assignment was to work on a cloned version of a project that Reaction Commerce, an open-source JavaScript platform for e-commerce, had posted to GitHub. What he built was so impressive that his Simulations Facilitator encouraged him to contribute his code to the upstream project.Reaction accepted his work, and Kolawole ended up making significant contributions to the project, enabling Reaction to add pop-up notifications to its dashboard. Shop owners and guests now receive a notice on the dashboard when an order is placed. Owners can also send and configure SMS notifications.“During the development of the notifications feature, I faced a lot of challenges, but the biggest of them was trying to make the notification process reactive enough for a shop owner or guest user to get instant feedback when an order is made,” said Kolawole.Reaction expressed its gratitude to Kolawole through a shout-out on the Reaction blog. But he didn’t work alone — other developers including Andela’s Joshua Azemoh also assisted Reaction with the updates.So what excited Kolawole about working on this project? “The organized code-base was easy to navigate, but the most interesting part about working on the product was the number of people who depended on it — over 3000 users. Who wouldn’t love to contribute?”Kolawole’s submissions demonstrate how Andela’s Simulations Program prepares our developers for work on real teams. And he’s already thinking of new ways to work with Reaction: “For my next contribution, I would love to contribute to the digital products feature. Also, I hope to contribute to many more features.”