My Experience with Andela learning community program ALC 3.0 in Tanzania.

Hello, My name is Justine Peterson @justinelimtz I am an aspiring full-stack software developer in JavaScript. This last year(2018) I had a chance to attend a software learning program by Andela the Andela Learning community in Tanzania(ALC 3.0).

It all started by seeing the link to the ALC program through the Buni hub’s Twitter account and since it was not the first time to hear about Andela I said let me give it a try, so I registered and waited. After about a month I got an email notification from Andela that i had been accepted into the ALC program and I was directed to the ALCinTanzania slack channel, this was the first time I had seen slack it was a bit confusing but since I was later familiar with it.

From the slack channel I was welcomed by a number of new members who none of I had a mate in the face, yeah so the journey to this new social network had started. Later mentors welcomed us to join the openclassrooms.com web developer curriculum which is a structured curriculum that is required to take someone from being completely new to programming to a software developer, some concepts and topics to me were familiar and few were new since I had been learning the basic of computer programming on my own and some programming languages like c programming I had learned at school so for me apart from the openclassrooms platform few of the things were new.

The program introduced me to the following important concepts that I had a little understanding of and some I had not touched before.

1. Bootstrap
2. Version control systems(Git and Github)
3. JavaScript DOM
4. Reacjs
5. Nodejs
6. MongoDB

Those are just a few of the technologies that I enjoyed through this program, the curriculum was so good and rich in content.

Apart from the online self-learning curriculum, our mentors decided to create a meetup program where thanks to Liquid telecom who provide us with free internet, and BUNI Hub who provided us a nice place to meet and code with a nice space and electricity also I mus appreciate it, Subway Masaki, for the snacks, with the efforts of our mentors and these companies I have mentioned how we were able to meet every Saturday for a meetup whereby we could talk face to face with fellow learners, share doubts and challenges.

Through these meetups, I benefited a lot but the following are just a few among them.

1. I got connected to a community of learners and ninjas a community rich with loving and caring friends.
2. I got connected to senior developers like Joshua Mabina, Edgar, Landry, and Isaya to name a few.

The ALCinTanzania’s final meetup was 16th of March 2019, again this was an amazing life-changing day. we had talks from fellow leaner senior coders and above all the talk from the Andela Kigali and Andela Nigeria who among many other were introduced to the Andela Fellow a life-changing opportunity for African developers to work with global tech companies as well as gain world-class tech skills.

There is a lot of good to talk about concerning the ALC program but let me say that for any aspiring developer looking to grow and connect ALC is one of the best programs to join and I am looking forward to joining the ALC 4.0 this year.

Like apostle Paul in the book of Philippians 3:13 …I do not consider myself yet to have laid hold of it. But one thing I do…straining toward what is ahead.

Until then Tchao…!