It is no longer news that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and wife, Priscilla Chan, invested $24 million in Andela – the start-up that trains Developers in Africa and places them to work with Global Engineering Teams via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).
Today, the focus of the article is on some of the bright minds from Andela (Nigerian developers in this case) that have made it into the global limelight on one level or the other.
- Prosper Otemuyiwa – Google Developer Expert (category: Web Technologies) and world-renowned Developer made it big when his Laravel Hackathon Starter pack beat out Facebook to become the second trendy PHP developer on GitHub’s Top Trending list. This is a rather big deal considering the fact that Facebook publishes tools for the open-source community to improve the PHP Programming Language. Although Prosper has now moved on from his role as Trainer at Andela, he attained such feat while he was still at Andela.
- Tolulope Komolafe – In 2015, the New Yorker published an article about an Orientation for Offshore Colleagues where Tolu and a fellow Andelan, Jesmine Omonori were the center of the piece in their work with an overseas firm, Everplans. Since then, Tolu (and her story) has been featured on countless other sites such as Reuters, VOA , Ventures Africa. Likewise, in December 2016, her story was featured in Ozy’s The Daily Dose in a chat with Christina Sass, Andela’s Co-founder and COO. One particular stand out was when she joined anti inflammatories Andela’s CEO, Jeremy Johnson in an interview on CNN with Fareed Zakaria.
- Chibuzor Obiora – Similar to Tolu’s Story, in 2016, Chibuzor joined Wall Street Journal’s Tanya Rivero at Lunch break to discuss what it takes to join Andela. His story has been told by TechCrunch’s Christine Magee who now runs communication at Andela and Business Insider to name a few.
- Sanni Yetunde – aka Sanni Yettie, is a co-founder of TechInPink – an organisation that teaches girls to code. In January 2017, Yettie was listed among the Top 50 Visionary Women to watch in 2017 by Innov8tiv. Prior to that, in October 2016, she received a TopTal STEM Scholarship for Women.
There are so many other notable mentions that I can’t possibly list in this article. But today, we make an addition to the list; Innocent Amadi. At the Global Facebook for Developers Conference today, VP Partnerships at Facebook, Ime Archibong made reference to Innocent as one of the people who has created a Developer Circle (their recently launched platform) for Lagos.
Innocent is world famous!!!! pic.twitter.com/dVuqPeDLmZ
— Iyinoluwa Aboyeji (@iaboyeji) April 18, 2017
We’ll profile more developers in the days to come, but from today’s occurrence, we can assume two things. One, the Fellows at Andela tend to be filled with a drive to contribute to their community as seen by the number of open-source projects and meetups they churn out. Also, that Andela actively unashamedly promotes her own (peep, the meet the developers section on their site).
https://twitter.com/Andela_Nigeria/status/854394995872337921
Also, a special thank you to Ime Archibong for the shout-out #f82017.
