Collaboration and project management tools are things that almost all managers rely on when running a distributed team, according to a survey of 500+ engineering leaders. But too often, these systems track the progress of projects without paying attention to the human beings working on them. People are more motivated and more satisfied when they’re […]
You are one of luckiest people at this time (circa 2019) because your job is one of the top jobs of this era. You are the cynosure of all eyes and perceived to be the shaper of the future, you have a made a good choice. When I was getting started as a Software Developer, I almost got […]
This is a summary note/transcript for the technical workshop held in Andela Nairobi in February 2019. OVERVIEW & PURPOSE The technology we use today has become integral to our lives and increasingly we expect it to be always available and responsive to our unique needs, whether it is showing us when a service is almost […]
Bradley Scott, Andela’s VP of Technology Product, has years of experience managing product and engineering teams of all types, so he knows the do’s and don’ts of remote work firsthand. Here, he shares four ways to overcome common objections to distributed work and build strong engineering teams. His first recommendation? If you want your developers […]
If onboarding is something you leave to your HR team, think again. The first few weeks on the job determine how successful an engineer will be for the next few years, and the data backs it up: A lack of investment in onboarding among high-growth companies is in part why 25% of tech employees now […]
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 […]
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise […]
Introduction A three-tier architecture is a software architecture pattern where the application is broken down into three logical tiers: the presentation layer, the business logic layer and the data storage layer. This architecture is used in a client-server application such as a web application that has the frontend, the backend and the database. Each of […]
Before joining Andela as a software developer, Gordon Kisakye spent the first two years after getting his degree in software engineering working at a startup in Kampala. Even though he mostly built websites at the startup, Gordon says it’s the work he put in to try to get through the Andela boot camp that […]
Rehema Wachira is a software developer at Andela Kenya. In this post, we’ll be looking at her journey into software development and the work she does as a leading technologist. This is a transcribed interview. What did you do before Andela? Andela is my first job as a software developer. I studied Political and Social […]
Before joining Andela, Femi Senjobi worked as a freelance developer, digital marketer, and content creator. “I worked mostly with WordPress. However, I build a number of applications from ground up using PHP/MySQL and frameworks like code igniter. I did a little bit of graphic designing, at least enough to pass my message.” “First, it was […]
IMPACT on a code base can be described as how your code affects existing code base. This can be measured by the number of lines you’ve added or updated, the number of files touched and most importantly the cognitive complexity on the changes you’ve added. Generally, engineers’ impact can be affected due to many external […]
Talks at Andela held its third session on Wednesday, January 16, 2019, with Cloudinary Developer Advocate Timirah James as the guest speaker. It was the first time we would make the sessions open to developers and other attendees outside of Andela. After successfully organizing two previous sessions, it felt more fitting to open up the […]
A lack of diversity and a shortage of qualified candidates are two of the top hiring challenges identified by 36,000 engineers in a 2018 survey by HackerRank. To overcome these challenges and tap into a global talent pool, many companies are going distributed. After publicly committing to diversify their engineering team, Gusto embraced the distributed […]
“The future is here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson We started Andela to chip away at a simple, though seemingly insurmountable, problem. The world needs millions more developers than we currently have. Time and again, we’ve seen the leverage created for companies and countries by great engineers. But over the past […]
The phrase “10x developer” is everywhere – whether you’re trying to become one, mentor one, or hire one, working with a person 10x as productive another team member sounds like a dream. The problem? No one knows what traits truly make a developer 10x. Bradley Scott, VP Product at Andela, interviewed 3 technology leaders on […]
3 Ways to Celebrate the Holidays with your Distributed Team Your team may be slowing down for the holidays or in a mad rush to complete a project by the end of the year. Nevertheless, it is a time to celebrate and reflect on the year that is coming to an end. While it’s easy […]
Quantum computing is becoming one of the most talked about new technology even though it does not fully exist yet. Technology has advanced significantly in recent years, our mobile phones have become more powerful than the computer NASA used to put a man on the moon and it gets better by the day. In the nearest […]
The demand for blockchain engineers continues to soar despite what appears to be a dwindling buzz around the technology. News coverage and ads around blockchain technology may not be at the fever-pitch level of 2017, but the technology has since displayed a level of resilience that virtually ensures that conversations about it never quite […]
You’re Hiring The Wrong Developers. Here’s Why: Nobody wants to hire a junior developer – just look at the number of senior developer job listings compared to their entry level counterparts. However, the idea that leaders can scale their teams by hiring only senior developers is a myth. For your team to truly scale successfully, […]
Due to the need to provide continued engagement beyond the program period, Andel partnered with Pluralsight, a learning platform providing useful training content to launch grow with Google scholarships that trained 10,2744 qualifying applicants in Android and mobile web Google in partnership with Andela and Pluralsight launched a Grow with Google Scholarships program to train […]
The second edition of Talks at Andela held on November 14, 2018, with Brian Douglas, developer advocate at GitHub, speaking on Improving Your Developer Workflow With GitHub Apps. Brian’s talk, which spanned about an hour focused on two main apps – Probot and Actions. Probot is an open-source pre-built app that triggers actions by listening to […]
When interviewing candidates for a VP of Engineering role, have you ever asked the question: “What’s the most difficult professional challenge you’ve faced and how did you overcome it?” 10 out of 10 times, the answer you’ll get is about a management challenge or personnel issue. There’s the productive developer who isn’t a team player. […]
More often than not, as a Community Manager at Andela, tech managers, startup founders, developers, and technology enthusiasts approach me with one critical question in mind, What skill set should a software developer have?” At Andela, we believe that developer skills can be categorized under two major groups – Work skills and Team skills. Work […]
The top 3 teams from the #AndelaNewsHackathon with a section of the Andela Kenya team and the BBC team at BBC’s #BeyondFakeNews Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. (Photo courtesy: BBC) The BBC recently released a report on “Verification, Duty, Credibility: Fake News and ordinary citizens in Kenya and Nigeria” that highlighted what ‘fake news’ really is, […]
Background M-Pesa is a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone for Safaricom and Vodacom the largest mobile network operators in Kenya and Tanzania. M-Pesa allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money and pay for goods and services (Lipa na M-Pesa) easily with mobile devices. M-Pesa has spread quickly like […]
The Andela Learning Community (ALC) is happy to announce a new learning track for graduates of the Google Africa Scholarship Challenge. Courtesy of a partnership with Pluralsight and Google, 10,000 aspiring technologists will benefit from the Grow With Google Scholarships program for Android and Mobile Web. This opportunity is also open to Developer Student Clubs, […]
Ever since Facebook’s React was open sourced at the Javascript Conference in May 2013, it has gone on to shape Front-end development for most developers. 66.9% of devs polled in Stack Overflow’s 2017 Developer Survey ranked it as the most loved Framework, Library, and Other Framework On its website, React is defined, quite simply, […]
The inaugural edition of Talks At Andela happened this October, and we had none other than the excellent Subbu Allamaraju as our first guest speaker. Subbu is the Vice President of Technology at Expedia Group, and he shared insights on how to get unstuck when one hits a rut either in their career or personal […]
The concept behind Lean UX is that the first design iteration isn’t conclusive, so don’t spend too much time on it. Build a minimum working product based on assumptions and start collecting user feedback immediately. In an agile environment, design cycles i.e gathering user requirements, researching and finally documenting everything, are often marred with […]
We recently held our inaugural launch ceremony for Fellows completing the Andela Fellowship. Rukayat Sadiq, one of the launching devs penned down a summary of her remarkable journey and experience in the fellowship: Endings are often characterized by sad and/or mixed feelings. This is different. Last month saw the celebration of the completion of the […]
Scaling companies anywhere is tough. Growing from 100 – 1000 employees in 2 years is extremely tough. But driving that kind of workplace growth across Africa is something that has never been done before. This June, at the Great Place to Work Awards, we ranked number one (#1!) across the board: Best Company to Work […]
Written by Bodunrin Akinola A quick test for you: Name the first woman in tech that comes into your head. What’s the chance that names like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Meyer came to mind? Yes, those are both tech leaders who are doing amazing things. Now, how about the women leading Nigeria’s tech industry? You may […]
Junior… We’ve all been there. At one time or another in our careers, most of us have started at the bottom, and over time, evolved our skills in order to be known as “senior.” We’ve had lots of challenges — while there may be some we’ve overcome alone, most of us have had support along […]
On Thursday, September 20, 2018, we made history at Andela. We launched the first set of Fellows who formed the earliest cohorts of developers we started with four years ago. The journey of these 21 awesome developers is the first peek at what the Andela Fellowship is about; their stories will form the foundation for […]
Purity Birir will be attending this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston, Texas from September 26–28, 2018. Her journey into software development is one that began in apathy towards the status quo, and a burning desire to contribute to the world as best as she could. Not long before Purity became an Andela developer, […]
