Insights

How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence for the Workplace

Emotional intelligence is currently the most in-demand soft skill, especially in technology. Top companies have realized that employees with high emotional intelligence are able to thrive in the workplace because they possess excellent people skills and an ability to analyze and control situations effectively. Daniel Goleman, in his book titled “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter […]

Extending Andela’s Footprint in 2019

Earlier this year, in January, Andela announced our $100m Series D round. This was yet another symbolic validation of building a business with a purpose. Over the last four years, we have created an on-ramp to the global technology ecosystem for close to 1,200 African engineers, delivered excellent engineering services to hundreds of partner companies, […]

Level Up as a Distributed Engineering Manager

If you ask engineering leaders to tell you the most challenging part of their role, most of them will say management. And these days — with companies building teams spread around the world and local developers working from home — engineering managers find organizing, managing, and nurturing a global herd of computer-programming cats even more […]

How Will You Drive #BalanceForBetter?

From a record-breaking number of women receiving VC funding in Silicon Valley to the growing number of women earning technical degrees in Nigeria (the country with the 4th fastest growing developer community on Github) — gender balance in tech is a global agenda. Andela has made a commitment to increasing female tech talent since day […]

Your Health, Dear Developer

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 […]

Building a serverless data pipeline

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 […]

Four Simple Tips for Stronger Distributed Teams

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 […]

How To Deploy Your React App to AWS S3

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 […]

How to Design a Three-Tier Architecture in AWS

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 […]

Solving Hard Things: Femi Senjobi’s Developer Journey

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 […]

Improving Impact Amongst Engineers

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 […]

Personal Branding for Developers with Timirah James

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 […]

Gusto

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 […]

How to Build a 10x Team: 4 Tips From the Experts

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 […]

Quantum Computing: The Real Game Changer

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 Quiet Rise in Demand For Blockchain Engineers

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 […]

Senior Developer Myths

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, […]

ALCwithGoogle and Pluralsight November 2018

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 […]

Redefining the 10x Developer: The Power of EQ x IQ

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. […]

Developer Skills For The Workplace

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 […]

Beyond Fake News: The Andela News Hackathon 

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, […]

Demystifying The M-Pesa API

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 […]

Is React Worth The Hype?

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 Efficacy of Lean UX

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 […]

Rukayat Sadiq’s Developer Journey

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 […]