My Most Recent Challenging Learning Experience

The term Tip of the Iceberg can best describe the conscious part of our mind that brings awareness to our environments and also in our learning experiences. Researchers declared that only 10% is used in our daily lives, meaning that what drives our activities is the remaining 90% which is the subconscious mind. This is a post about my journey of transferring the best version of me from the conscious to the subconscious part of my mind and the results are awesome.

On Tuesday, 24th July 2018. I happened to pass my interview for a boot camp program at the amazing Andela company and shortly after an entry to a pre-boot camp challenge. During the first two weeks, we were given some challenges to handle, some documentation to guide us and a learning facilitator to mentor us. The challenges were in parts but to sum it all up it was a web application that facilitates learning, where people could ask questions and others could answer them. We were expected to have Integrity as our core principle when working, integrate best practices, collaborate with our team members and adhere to the company principles and above all meet deadlines.

The Setup
Coming from a different programming environment and culture, this seemed so hard to achieve within the deadlines. Let me give you a picture of what I am talking about. This included making a User Interface with the basic web technologies, learning a new python framework called Flask, make API’s, version your API’s and make sure you practice TDD (Test Driven Development). Finally be able to communicate professionally with the involved stakeholders through a platform called Pivotal Tracker (bear in mind that you have to learn how to use this platform). All these summed up the initial parts to be completed within the first two weeks.

The Case Scenario
What really happened the first time you were learning to drive? (or something challenging for those who never tried driving). Your eyes were on the road while your mind kept track of which gear is in action (yeah that’s manual cars). You couldn’t even answer any question, try to take a phone call or say hi to a passenger. It seemed as hard as ever. The only excitement you had was a “well done!” from your driving teacher after the drive. However as time went on, you could subconsciously keep track of the gear number, talk on the phone, say hi to or offer a lift to a walking passenger. Now driving like a pro became a good part of you.

The Output (hurrah!!)

This is will be an outline of how I managed to solve the challenges for better output.

First thing I did during the first week was to plan my learning and working schedule for time management. There is a reason why projects have deadlines. Second I applied one of Andela’s framework called ASK (Actionable Specific and Kind) to ask questions when am stuck. Point to note, getting stuck on a particular challenge (or commonly known as blockers) can consume time so make sure that you don’t sit on it for more than 20 minutes but seeking help to save time. Integrity is a core principle to ensure that your works flows smoothly. How does it relate? Being trusted to write stable application with minimum supervision is very important.
Thirdly for best practices of a framework or a programming language, check its documentation. That’s how I managed to handle Test Driven Development appropriately.

Fourth thing I did to learn more was to contribute more. This makes you understand challenges and better ways to solve them.

Getting on the second-week things seemed easy as if I was starting to conform to the system or rather the skills from the experience had been integrated into my subconscious mind. As per this post writing period, I have just finished my two weeks of the pre-boot camp challenge demo to my learning facilitator and he said (…..drum rolls please), “well done!”. It’s a great feeling indeed.
My final lesson:

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