Dockerizing Rails: One Workshop To 'Dockerize' in Abuja

We were in Abuja, Nigeria, over the weekend to organize Andela's first technical workshop in the city. All the weeks of planning paid off, as the turnout was pretty impressive. There was an engineer who came all the way from Benin City for the workshop. If sojourning the length of half the country to arrive just shy of first place at a workshop doesn't spell passion, I don't know what does. (Respect, Mark Edosa, if you're reading this.)The workshop was themed Dockerizing Rails (now that title makes sense, all of a sudden). It was led by Igbanam, who made an excellent show out of it. Igbanam had to modify the title a little bit, to "Dockerizing Apps", seeing as a major number of engineers who signed up for the workshop were JavaScript engineers.That was fun. We also had our technical recruiters around to talk to the engineers in the room about the possibility of working for Andela as remote software engineers in Abuja. This is a program we're exploring at the moment, and this workshop was a good place to kick things off.Abuja seemed like a natural choice for us to hold our first workshop outside of Lagos in Nigeria. (They are a somewhat regular feature in the cities we operate in across the continent.) No other city boasts a developer ecosystem as vibrant as the one in Lagos for obvious reasons. But cities like Abuja, Uyo, Kaduna, etc aren't too far behind. Andela is a distributed engineering company, and we wield remote work adeptly. We have remote teams in Accra and Cairo already, and our operations are going to continually scale up.

The Fireside Chat:

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Fireside chat with Osoba (Marketing & Comms Mgr, Andela Nigeria)and Igbanam (Senior Software Engineer)[/caption]We also had a fireside chat right after the workshop. It served as an avenue to, among other things, unpack what it means to work as a software engineer at Andela. It kind of helped smoothen the path for our technical recruiters who came on afterward to talk about specifics on how to apply to join the company.

Wielding Remote Work:

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Our technical recruiters taking questions from the audience.[/caption]One question that came up a couple of times while our recruiters took the stage was on how the remote set up would work. The folks who asked were mainly curious about how the support system worked. Would there be anyone to unblock them if they were stuck? Is there an office to go to if one needed to meet with a colleague? Our recruiters clarified that software engineers at Andela are part of distributed teams collaborating in real-time across several time zones. They always have the support of their team members and have other support staff working to ensure that they are able to do their best work without hassles.In case you missed the workshop, and are keen on joining Andela as a software engineer, check out our careers page. We're hiring!

Read: How To Organise Your Own Tech Conference: Lessons From PyCon Africa 2019.