Our Story

How we met

We met for the first time Febuary 2017 at Andela's (Nigeria) Bootcamp session. No, we weren't undergoing Bootcamp together. Mercy alongside other talents were working hard to get into the Andela Fellowship. Raphael was among the Engineers already at Andela overseeing the Bootcampers to ensure they had the tenacity and met the requirements to thrive in the Fellowship and the industry at large.

The very first thing that caught Raphael's attention was Mercy's unique light voice tone. It's almost the first thing everyone notices. Mercy performed excellently well and was among the top talents joining Andela from that Bootcamp. 💃

And so on the first day that Mercy resumed work at Andela (March 2017), Raphael sent a DM (via Slack) - a normal DM - just to say 'Hi' and to welcome a new teammate. Mercy responded and we got along well and then became friends at work.

Tech stack

At Andela (during the Fellowship era), after the initial training phase (Simulations), an Engineer moves to the Apprenticeship phase where they get to work on an internal product. Raphael was on the VOF project then. When Mercy was about to select her Apprenticeship project, she..., you guessed it, chose VOF. She was accepted into the project to contribute and upskill. VOF was being built using Ruby on Rails, so it meant Mercy had to learn Ruby on Rails and she did. Ladies and gentlemen, that's how we ended up on the same tech stack 😂.

Needless to say, working on the same project provided avenues for us to brainstorm, work on tasks and further spent time together. We were just friends at this point. Soon Raphael's time at VOF was up and he was officially done with his Andela training phase. Over the next few months our friendship grew closer by the day and it wasn't long before suspicion began that maybe we were dating 😅.

Dating

We had known so much about each other that it felt like we've been friends for years. By November 2017, we officially began dating, having both come to the conclusion that there's more to us than meets the eye. Everything flowed naturally. Thankfully, it wasn't an issue at work, as long as we are both not working on the same team and don't let emotions cloud our judgment at work. We still can't tell how exactly we did it throughout the couple of years of working and being together at Andela, but we're super grateful for the time there.

We both went on to work with different Andela partners as Full Stack Software Engineers, helping them scale their businesses and deliver value to their customers. Read more about our professional careers here.