MY SSA GDG SUMMIT EXPERIENCE
- *Readers discretion is advised. Article is lengthy but I am sure you will enjoy it. I guess.
The Sub-saharan Africa GDG and DSC summit experience 2019 for GDG leads and DSC Organisers in the region took place at the Alisa Swiss Spirit Hotel and Suits, Accra, Ghana. It had all the thrills of an exciting, engaging and informative Summit experience. I am thankful to SSA regional core team for the opportunity.
MY JOURNEY TO ACCRA
The time was 5:00 AM and my alarm bell wont stop ringing. I had a flight to catch at 11:50 AM Nigerian time from Lagos to Accra.
My current Location? Badore — Ajah, Lagos. To as many who have one time or the other heard about the huge population figure of people residing in Lagos (Over 20 million people and counting) and the traffic congestion that comes with it did have a tit-bit experience about the ordeal I had to pass through in order to make my flight.
I had to remind myself that I had made it to this point and I wont forfeit this journey due to traffic. So I was up bright and early. My bag was ready, ticket, yellow fever document and International Passport all set. Now I had a decision to make, either to drive with my usual ride(Uncle’s ride) or order Bolt (formerly taxify). In order to avoid stories that touch to my Uncle, a taxify was perfect. After several man hours in traffic we made it to MMA (Muritala Muhammed Airport ) by 9:05 AM after setting out from Ajah around 6:00 AM in the morning.
I got to connect with some wonderful GDG Organizers from Nigeria at the Cafeteria section of the airport. Dave (GDG Ikorodu), Kamal (GDG Illorin), Joseph (GDG Benin) and Uduah (GDG Calabar). Uduah went on to be a very funny character in our group.
We had some sketchy experience with the immigration officers at MMA (The usual find something for us experience) which was later resolved. I was calm with the whole experience as I was gently telling myself very soon, very soon this too shall pass and it did.
We checked in, got stamped and waited to board the plane. At 11:40 we boarded African World Airlines moving from Lagos to Accra. Mind you this was my second experience flying outside the country by flight. My first experience was on a flight from Lagos to UK with my Aunt (I was a minor then) then I had at a time also travelled to Benin and Lome by road. The Plane took off at about 12 noon Nigerian time, we enjoyed our flight and then landed Accra about 40 minutes later.
We checked into the summit venue, which was Alisa Swiss Spirit Hotel & Suites, in the heart of Accra Ghana. I don’t know much about hotel ratings but I wouldn’t be surprised if this hotel is some four star-ish if not five star-ish hotel in the ratings. Nice and ventilated rooms, clean toilets, pool side, dinner area, good wifi, great halls. An all round welcoming and homely ambience.
We had dinner with DSC leads after arriving Accra that Thursday. We got paired with our room mate on that very day. Well I was lucky to got paired with the jolly and matured fellow in GDG Cloud Kaduna Co-organizer p.k.a Pablo! If you are reading this, big shout out to you. I appreciate all the conversations we had.
THE SUMMIT
The GDG Summit kick started on Friday 13th Sept 2019 with SSA Program Manager number one in person of Aniedi Udo-Obong giving his Keynote Speech on the seven P’s of building a successful community. He later went on to lead a workshop where we shared ideas and discussed about Purpose (Why do your community exist?) and People (Who are your members?). On my desk we discussed about how our GDG’s can actually start up each year with a well cut out objective for the community which helps us achieve a certain goal for each year outside the usual sanctioned meetups. I shared a case study on my desk of how we having a number of developer newbies (20 in number) looking to have them grow from newbies to junior/intermediate developer level before end of the year at our ongoing Fullstack development bootcamp in my community at GDG Ajah. We believe this is a key metric for ascertaining impact as a community in the year 2019.
I had the privilege of listening to other inspiring and thrilling talks from other speakers at the summit.
I found Mr. Fongoh Martin lead organizer of GDG Buea in Cameroon talk as one very inspiring as he presented a talk about — Running a Developer Community in a crisis ridden area. Mr. Martin briefed us about the ongoing dispute between the Anglophone and Francophone parties in Cameroon which has turned out to be a full scale Civil crisis/war. He talked about how respecting the opinions of both parties in the dispute as well as scheduling his meetups/workshop at venues that are accessible to emergency help had helped the community to continue to give young Cameroonians hope about a future with Technology amidst all the social unrest.
Another amazing and inspiring talk came from Solomon Opio (GDG Cloud Kampala) lead. He spoke about how his efforts in starting up a bi-weekly Cloud workshop training program tailored around training teenagers especially girls on how to use the GCP. This overtime got his community massive spotlight from the Google Cloud team. As a result he attended Google Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco on the backdrop of the impact his community is having. This was very inspiring for me.
Other Informative Sessions that were held are as follows in no particular order.
One funny thing is I have kept close tabs on how Googler’s give presentations of late. Key things I have noticed in their presentation is ‘Simplicity’ and ‘Relatability”. This particular speaker had this in high proportion alongside others. I enjoyed Mr. John Kimani’s talk about the GDE program and ways to get into the program as a community organizer. Mr. John Kimani happens to be Sub-saharan Africa Program manager for the GDE program. He talked about benefits of being a GDE as follows:
· Acknowledgement by Google (Being an acknowledged developer or technologist by Google).
· Access to Google Engineering team’s projects and products (Enjoying beta release of certain products where you help test and give insightful feedbacks of some of their products before it is fully launched to end users).
· A GDE has global access to professionals. (A GDE is exposed to Google’s global partner program with lots of business to help scale and lots of industry experts to connect with).
· Invitations to Events. (GDE’s get support to travel to several conference and events all across the year).
He also gave a detailed breakdown on how to become a GDE.
· A prospective GDE must have a track record of consistent tech contribution either via Tech Blogs, YouTube video tutorials, or community speaking and workshop facilitation.
· A prospective GDE must be technically grounded in one of listed tech areas on the GDE programs website.
· A prospective GDE must have a visible community footprint.
He finally rounded up his presentation by saying the GDE program is not a certification program but more of a acknowledgement for the body of work you have done as an expert in a particular tech area and more importantly your consistent contribution to the community.
I also enjoyed Googler Benson Kinoti (Google African Scholarship Program Director) as he broke down the current ALC 4.0 progress meter across all learning tracks. He gave some insightful numbers about learner’s progress on the Pluralsight platform.
Other lightening talks from super energised GDG leads came from Dave Omakaro (GDG Ikorodu lead) as he talked about building an impactful community using his community as case study.
I really enjoyed other Googler sessions like that of Erica Hanson (DSC Global Community lead) as she gave a talk on Stories — What will your Impact be? She shared very inspirational and impactful stories from GDG and DSC communities across the world. We were encouraged to share our stories of impacts in our community as developer communities should be run with the goal of making impacts as a community and sharing these stories of impacts serves as catalyst that help other communities and members grow. She listed the several form of impact stories we can share such as
· Outstanding developer growth in your community.
· Mentorship
Another interactive and engaging workshop session was that of the Googler Rana Abdelhamid on Gender Equality in Tech. We talked intrinsically about the gender equality issue in the world and the solutions to how we can bridge the gap of the 70% male to 30% females in tech statistics. She shared the stories of notable women in todays tech space and what they are doing to ensure more women participation in building todays and tomorrows solutions that does solve problems women and the world are facing. Comments were made about having to actively get women into tech from a young age, saying what many learnt from their homes while growing up in Africa families were factors that affects their participation in STEM and general tech related positions.
PEOPLE AT THE SUMMIT
This particular aspect was the highlights of the summit for me. Having to connect with GDG and DSC leads from over 20 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa was a surreal experience for me. I remembered a Googler saying the SSA GDG and DSC Summit is one summit in Africa that brings together a huge number of young African minds for a conference where they can share their stories and learn from each other and see the similarities and differences of their experience and how it connects us rather than divide us but inspires us to do better.
I was privilege to meet with Paula Rerimoi (GDG Eldoret Co-organizer/WTM lead). We met at a workshop where we were asked about what inspired us to get into Tech. She also had inspiring story to tell on how she got into tech as a curious college student who travelled long distances to make meetups at GDG Rift Valley. She talked about how she has always been passionate about Technology and wanted to make a social impact using Google technologies. This led her to building an app which help young girls get access to sexual and reproductive health information and also find a clinic near them with their phones. I was amazed and inspired by her journey and story.
Generally, I met with passionate community leads from across Sub-saharan Africa. It was nice connecting in person with certain faces behind the community work we see online. Important mentions are Mercy Merkus (GDG Cloud Kaduna Co-organizer / WTM Kaduna), my roomie Peter popularly known as Pablo (GDG Cloud Kaduna), Kamal (GDG Ilorin), Abimbola (WTM Ilorin), Dave (GDG Ikorodu), Kurt (GDG Johannesburg), Patience (DSC from a Uganda University) to mention a few. I had an amazing time with these jolly people.
THE FOOD
(Food , food , food and more food)
What are conferences or summit without the food? If I should give the feeding structure a theme or title I did call it “Ounje jo ma pa mi now..” (The English translation did be “Food please don’t kill me”). I had never been so scared of food until this summit. Morning breakfast, Lunch, Breakout lunch, and Dinner were all food galore. Different local Ghanaian food as well as continental cuisines. Yeah , yeah we got the opportunity to taste the Ghanian Jollof first hand and compare it with the Nigerian jollof back home. Coming from a very sincere stand point even if you think my Nigerian sentiments might play in; The truth is the Ghanian Jollof is not as delicious or tasty as the Nigerian Jollof. The Ghanaian jollof is just a low budget concoction rice (Nigerians did know what I mean the more) with a lot of small meat inside to confuse you instead of convince you. No competition here people, Nigerian Jollof is on another level. If you really doubt the power of the Nigerian Jollof come to Lagos and see for yourself. It is the reason why a reasonable number of married Nigerian men are with pot belly.
DEVFEST ACCRA
Part of the summit experience was an opportunity to attend Devfest Accra 2019. We made our way down to the CSIR institute in well coordinated transport shuttle. The 180+ GDG and DSC leads where in attendance at the event along side Ghanaian techies from all across Accra.
The highlight of Devfest Accra for me was a breakout session talk on “Adoption of Blockchain Technology”. It was an engaging session where we discussed the various use-cases of Blockchain and how it has come to stay and the various problems in our society we can solve with the technology. I made a contribution on the future of decentralised payment with the much anticipated Libra coin. I also had the opportunity of connecting with JET a block chain developer and DSC lead from Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. I am hoping to bring JET as a Blockchain speaker at Devfest Ajah.
AFRICAN DINNER NIGHT / PARTY
Parties are best explained in pictures and this I would try to do.
CONCLUSION
I really enjoyed the experience at my very first SSA summit as a GDG Organizer. I am really appreciative of the efforts of SSA leads in persons of Aniedi Udo-Obong, Ada Oyom, Auwalms for making the summit more inclusive for other GDG’s who have not previously featured as well as the very good organisational efficacy that was carried out in hosting the summit. Surely there are room for improvement but generally the event was well organised. I saw a whole lot of popular faces in GDG Nigeria ecosystem were not in attendance as well as other GDG from Sub-Saharan Africa. SSA GDG Regional lead in person of Aniedi made mention of it as an approach to allow for more inclusiveness amongst GDG organizers within the region. It was a great time being a part of the experience.
Lest I forget, I say big thank you to my employers @ Unitech Global for giving me the opportunity of being a part of this wonderful experience even on a workday.🙈🙏🏾🤗
(**More pictures to come)
