Bootcamp Challenges, The Journey So Far.

The test of character is having the ability to meet challenges — Walter Annenberg

Hello learners, Its my task today to share some of my bootcamp challenges and how I have adjusted to the gruelling system of Andela so far. Its been an epic journey of growth and development but words cannot describe the level of mental stress and rigours I have encountered along the way to becoming a seasoned developer.

In search of more

What brought me to Andela was a yearning to be the best, to reach the apex of my potential and accomplish my dream of becoming a professional developer.

Becoming professional didn’t seem easy or acquirable from the study of voluminous books. I knew I needed to be crushed and remoulded into the pedigree I desired. So when Andela promised me 2 weeks of technical challenges and a chance to be in the same room with some of the nations best developers I jumped at the opportunity.

The Challenges

There is more to software development than coding. The bootcamp sessions I attended enlightened me on topics of software engineering that I was entirely ignorant to throughout my whole programming career. Project planning, Communication (ever heard of the seven C’s), Test driven development and Collaboration were some of the trending themes that kept on being emphasised among my learning facilitators. Why should I have to obey the agile development philosophy?, how can I test for code I haven’t yet written. These were some of the paradigms I found hard incorporating into my project.

Choosing to learn

I found out as the days went by that what I knew wasn’t all there was and the reason I would grow was highly dependent on my learning speed. No one knows everything and trivialising what my Learning facilitators called important was the quickest way of hampering my progress towards being a professional software developer. It took a while to come to grips with TDD(test driven development), but I finally got a hang of it. I viewed planning before coding as a waste of valuable time, and I never in a million years would have pictured myself writing detailed steps on how I planned to execute a project. But with pivotal tracker that insurmountable struggle became a thing of the past.

Takeaway

There will always be challenges, just like there will always be bugs. But solving and rethinking our struggles is what makes the difference between a problem solver and a whiner. Andela set me on a learning sprint that has forever changed my view on software development and I hope to continue in this daring path in the future to come.