My Expectations of the Andela Bootcamp
When I first heard of Andela, the one thing about them that caught my heart was the fact that they were out to build people who would otherwise not have the opportunity to become what they dreamed, and for free. Who does that these days? Apart from that I had always dreamed of starting an organisation like Andela, so when I heard about them, it was love at first hearing.
As a new student in the Computer Science departments, one of my dreams was to develop my own operating system and programming language that could stand tall and compete with the best in the world. I had read a lot of technical stuff, things I couldn’t make sense of and I felt the best place to make sense of them was in the Computer Science department. This dream began in 2007 when I wrote my first “Hello World!” application in html. I was also fascinated by Microsoft Applications and wanted to learn how to make stuff like that.
What happened to my dream? First day in “GW-Basic” programming class (2009), my lecturer came didn’t do much of explanation, provided no materials but gave us a code that would not run properly but asked us to go home and debug it. He told us to just copy and paste whatever he gave us in the exams, that we didn’t need to understand anything.
Still hungry to understand, I saved enough to buy a CD, go to a cyber cafe, downloaded a PDF file on GW-Basic, I would often borrow PCs to study and practice what I was learning and soon in my class I was the guy you would run to, to get your GW-Basic challenge solved. The point where I lost courage was when the lecturer for compiler construction walked into the class on the first day, I never forgot his words exactly as he used them “This course I am teaching you, if you want to pass copy what I give you and paste for me in the exam. Don’t try to understand it, even me taking you on this course, I did not understand anything. Since they decided to give me the course to take, I will take it. So copy your notes well and in the exams, give me what I gave to you.
I was heart broken, I had read the having a good knowledge of compiler construction would help me develop my own programming language, over time as I tried to study more about the course, I found the concepts too difficult to grasp and I eventually gave up. Mind you Internet was more than diamond, the mindset of using the Internet to search for solutions to problems also had not been properly inculcated.
Long story short, Andela made that dream come alive again, I was going learn from the best in the industry, not rusty old books, not half-baked lessons, but from people who know how it is done in the real world and are doing it.
It is my expectation that at the end of the Bootcamp, I would have honed enough skills to have the “YOYO DNA” actively working in my mindset and also learn what it takes to be a “World Class Developer” and how to implement my new knowledge.
YOYO — You Own Your Own (Learning)