On Friday, 8th March 2019, a group of young developers converged at Zone Tech Park, Gbagada, Lagos to attend the very first “Forloop Lagos Summit”. The event, held at the same venue, used to be called the “Forloop Lagos Meet-Up”. It has since garnered much attention, thus requiring a name change as it is no longer just a “Meet-Up”.
Such was explained during the welcome address by Forloop’s convener and co-founder, Prosper Otemuyiwa. He explained that this edition of the summit was to discuss different ways of cheating the developer experience by teaching young developers different ways of working faster and smarter.
The event kicked off with Charles Freeborn, a Tech Writer, Editor and Africa Ambassador for RunCloud, giving a talk about what RunCloud was and how it worked. It is a hassle-free PHP web application and server management panel that helps developers work in one place without stress.
Next was a Software Developer and part of the Forloop team, Okanlawon Emmanuel, who spoke on “Magnificent and Scalable UI’s with Tailwind”. It was a vast and extremely detailed talk into the use of Tailwind which was created by Adam Wathan.
In commemoration of International Women’s Day 2019, the first female developer took to the stage to speak on “Avoiding Shell Hell – aliases to the rescue”. Chiamaka Ikeanyi, a Software Developer at Konga, gave her very first conference talk, where she spoke on how aliases can save developers from having to write too many codes. It is pretty much an efficient way to cut down on doing too much writing and attaining optimum functionality. Ikeanyi, who also revealed she was a poet, ended her session with a poem.
Chiamaka Ikeanyi, Software Developer at Konga
“Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow is Mystery,
But you can save time,
Using Aliases.”
Buchi Okoro, CEO of Quidax, came up next to talk about cryptocurrency. According to him, Quidax is making it simple for people to access cryptocurrency using their local currency. He added that they have users in 70 countries and six continents.
Dara Oladapo, a technical evangelist at Microsoft in Lagos, explained the important ways developers can benefit from using Microsoft Azure Services and Azure DevOps.
Community Manager at Andela, Babajide Duroshola, gave a talk on what Andela is currently doing and what the company plans to do with the 100 million dollar funding they recently received. Andela is a global talent outsourcing company that has been able to impact 23,000 Africans with its Angela Learning Community fellowship program. Although they normally recruit talents from the fellowship program, Duroshola revealed they will now open applications to all developers in a bid to create more opportunities and impact more young African developers.
The panel session was particularly interesting. It had Aniedi Udo-Obong, Program Manager at Google; Tejumade Afonja, AI Engineer at Instadeep; Ehi Aigiomawu, Chief Technical Officer at Vesicash; Bayo Adekanmbi, Convener, Data Science Nigeria; and Babajide Duroshola from Andela. These panellists spoke on the topic “Emerging Technology Trends”. They encouraged the developers and explained that their work should be more about solving problems than creating apps.
Female developer from Andela Gift Egwuenu spoke on “Being Productive: How it will aid Advancement in your Career”. Joshua Oluwagbemiga of InVision gave tips on “Integrating Design Collaboration in the Workflow”. Remy Muhire from Progate, Cleopatra Douglas from Flutterwave and Olakunle Makanjuola of Vanhack also shared impactful ideas and experiences with the developers present at the summit.
The event was very beneficial in giving developers cheat codes, methods and useful tools to work more efficiently. It also featured games, and prizes were won. Prosper Otemuyiwa chipped in that Microsoft is now hiring in Lagos. Forloop gave away three hundred free dot tech domains names to the start-ups. One of the event sponsors, Progate, also gave free access to 500 aspiring students and developers in Nigeria for three months. The event had several sponsors like Microsoft, Quidax, Andela, VanHack, RunCloud, Progate and Cloudinary.