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DevCongress Meetup with Prosper Otemuyiwa and Celestine Omin in Accra

zooboole

Published By zooboole

Yesterday was probably one of the 2016 most exciting days for Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Kenyan developers. The meet up with the international and hard core evangelist Prosper Otemuyiwa and the Andela team took well place at the prestigious Meltwater Entrepreneurial School Of Technology as planned.

Group Picture DevCongress Accra

Group picture at the congress - Picture credit to Prosper Otemuyiwa

The team continues its evangelism today at Valley View University, Oyibi. If you are in Accra and you couldn't make it yesterday, you can still catch up.

Many developers, bloggers, and aspiring programmers/bloggers massively made it by showing up. You could meet people like Celestine Omin, Komolafe Tolulope, Femi Bilesanmi, Toni Edward Solarin, just to mention few.

Many of us were a bit late due to the traffic between 37 and Accra Mall. But we were all able to make it by the grace of God. We, at Lancecourse, couldn't miss it because a meet-up between Nigerian, Kenyan, and Ghanaian developers was essential for the new wind blowing on Africa.

Most African youths are turning back to the traditional way of living and embracing the Internet(IT) field. It happens that becoming someone with technology depends most on oneself, not on the government or any administrative body. Most people and firms understood that recently with the arrival of the creator of the giant social media website Facebook Mark Zuckerberg in Nigeria and Kenya. And when you realize that the first destination is usually to become a developer, a blogger, an e-merchant, etc.

We had that meet-up to address some points when it comes to web development, online entrepreneurship, and how to establish good relations with us all over the African continent. Here are some of the issues that were tackled:

  • How to start up a project as a developer
  • How to make your choice of tools when starting a project
  • Use of composer and its packages
  • How to sight a scaling project
  • The automation of each step in an IT infrastructure
  • Some deployments processes to adopt over traditional FTP
  • Elastic Search
  • The position of women in this field and why we should encourage them
  • Steps to make when starting
  • How to move from a junior developer through senior to expertise
  • Precautions to take when running an e-commerce website
  • How to help African developers to be more productive
  • The notion of becoming a world-class developer was also raised by Prosper
  • Tips on how to contribute to open-source projects by submitting patches and pull requests
  • How to focus on few(if not one) topic/programming language and master it very well
  • etc

Other countless topics were tackled after the meeting such as how we can promote each other. How to raise the image of Africa when it comes to technology in general or the Internet particularly.

This was the start of something much bigger to come. Everyone realized yesterday that he/she wasn't the only one in the field. We all received some anointment to keep it up.

With the hard work of Andela and schools like MEST, soon Africa will become a new place of technology enthusiasm. I can sight bigger events coming up such as international conferences throughout Africa. And I can prove that with recent PHP South Africa in South Africa and the DevKraft in Kenya where Andela was also part.

Andela's ambition of making more developers and IT entrepreneurs through Africa's promotion comes at the right time. A Time when youth need a new way of expressing themselves and making use of their potential without being barred by any life protocol.

Other most important topics which involve every African country were also addressed:

  • The electricity power issues
  • The Internet access and its quality

Africans might be motivated and engaged in developing much more IT infrastructures, but these two issues always come to slow or even kill everything.

We, as developers, suffer a lot from them. And it has become obvious that we will always find it hard to catch up on developers from Western countries as far as those issues have not been addressed.

Although there are maybe ways(or I should call it patches) to manage these problems, but most people can not always succeed in that.

Since we can't do something about this issue ourselves, it's left to our respective governments to think about it now. We expect that they realize the importance of new technologies in our continent and how they can help palliate most of our wounds, and therefore start solving those issues with much consideration.

To conclude I will say it's all complicated in Africa. Each one of us can testify that through his struggle before getting to the meetup.

But, we young men and women of this generation can do something about it: keep on working together like this. Make a borderless Africa through technology. We should help and promote each other.

We should assist the upcoming generation to understand what we understand better than us through education. And for that, we, at Lancecourse, deeply salute Andela for their effort in Africa.

Start doing something now, by helping this message reach every single person you know. That's how we grow together.

Thank you for your time. Like, love, share and comment.

Pictures credit to Prosper Otemuyiwa