Only those that are adaptive survive
Growing up whenever I faced a difficult situation in life I used to think of the song Only the strong survive by Jerry Butler which got me back in focus. This song got me gave me a lot of courage to face the toughest things without fear of the unknown and eventually I used to break through.
Only the strong survive by Jerry Butler
My journey at the Andela Boot camp has never been easy and every new brandy day is a blessing. At Andela, things are done a bit differently compared to the song by Jerry Butler only the strong survive that I had pinpointed earlier. Only those that are adaptive are the ones that go through each stage of the boot camp selection. At Andela, they test the candidates with so many things quality code is just but a part of it.
Whenever I had a bug in my code I could struggle to search through the internet and spend a lot of time and ended up even not getting the solution to that problem. When I wanted to learn a new concept in programming I would read the whole book about that topic. The 3 weeks I have had with Andela on the boot camp has sharpened me to change that perspective. You are to spend only 30 minutes at maximum with a bug or a blocker after which you’re required to seek some help from your peers. This change has made my programming life to become enjoyable than it used to feel stressed.
Back at High school, I would sneak and pray that I don’t get caught. And when maybe a perfect catch me and take me to the respective teacher for punishment I would blame that perfect for the whole term. At Andela, the topic about adaptability taught me that adaptable people don’t hold grudges but instead absorb, understand and move on with life as if something never happens.
Back at my current workplace, our tasks are evaluated by production and quality metrics. Then every end of the month you get rewarded with some incentives as per your scores. The better you get good scores the better your incentives gets. Quality is a priority but you need to keep it in balance with the production scores as well. That being said, I am used to going to work, log in on my machine and start work without caring how my fellow workmates are doing. I will just go to the document where the quality scores and production scores are posted and check who is ahead then work extra harder to surpass them so that I can get good incentives for the month. I have just learned that adaptable people don’t claim fame, they shift their focus to the next obstacle to get ahead of the game so that when everybody else jumps on board, they will have already moved on to the next challenge.
At the boot camp candidates are given a lot of resources for leveling up and you get mixed up in the process as per what resource you should read. The topic of adaptability says people who are adaptable to learn and keep learning. They are always curious and never stop learning. At Andela, you need to learn and learn very fast.
Communication is the heart of everything we do. Adaptable people realize the impact their words, tone and body language have on others which is why to play according to the personalities involved.
Teamwork, communication, and collaboration just to name a few are very fundamental at Andela. Take, for instance, every candidate at the boot camp must go through a project called an agile project that is meant to test different aspects of behavior on the candidate. We had this project yesterday, and it was very challenging because every member in the team has their own opinion on how they think it should be done. Everyone wants their idea to take the lead. Everyone is unique in their own way. In this kind of a project if you’re not willing to listen to others’ idea then you will be kind of limited in your thinking, which means you will also be limited in your adaptability as well. So, we had to sit down and agree on who is going to be the team lead and this team lead would now assign work to the team members and himself. The team lead was awesome he made sure that every team member gets to work on a single piece of work on each task. For example, every team member would contribute on writing user stories on the pivotal tracker, then work on let us say test-driven development in a collaborative manner.
Another challenge I used to have was fearing to stand in front of people and present some work but at Andela, that skill is required. So after going through the adaptability session my fear now is no more. I can comfortably speak in front of people and make sure I engage everyone to the topic for it be fun. I really enjoyed our presentations yesterday for the agile project. My team member really helped me to do an awesome presentation because every question that was thrown at the team we all reacted on it.
As a coder, I never knew what’s Test Driven Development was about until I came to Andela. I had to change from developing an application by starting on implementing the application and deliver it to the client to writing tests first then make them fail and as you fix them you build the application. This approach of building a software gives you confidence as a developer because you’re very sure your application is working as expected.
Let us change the way we eat, let us change the way live and let us change the way we treat each other …. Tupac Shakur