Waves Lagos Meetup 2019 — Awesome RIDE
Lucky Henry and I(Kelvin Omereshone) have always been enthusiastic and passionate about Waves Platform and the benefits we think it can offer developers in Africa. As a platform, it has a friendly ecosystem and tools for quickly creating and deploying of ideas on its blockchain.
So you can imagine our joy when we were given the green light by Waves Platform to hold the first Maiden event to introduce RIDE and Smart Contract development on the blockchain in the city of Lagos, Nigeria.
Preparations
Prior to the anticipation for Waves Meetup Lagos, we(Lucky Henry and I) have been quite the preacher for Waves Blockchain 😃. In various communities on several social platforms, we have been announcing for the meetup and possible advantages it would hold for developers interested in leveraging the Blockchain technology. We had a lot of positive feedback and these serve as fuel to stoke our ember of passion into a wildfire to drive the upcoming event to fruition. And believe me, it was needed for…
The Journey
We headed out for Lagos from Agbor on Thursday 12th of December, 2019. The journey was really not all that comfy but all we could think about was our potential audience and how they could benefit from the meetup.
Lagos Ho!
Arriving at Lagos(Nigerian Silicon Valley, we checked in to our hotel and immediately I started working on a prototype for a demo for a dApp we plan on showing to our audience for we believe proofs speak the loudest. Believe it or not, I ended up coding the prototype till 3:40 a.m on Saturday the 14th of December(and if you were following, you would know it was Meet-up day!)
So I caught a little sleep(what? a guy needs some shut-eye you know 😀). Then as early as we could set out, we headed out to the venue to get ready for our audience to arrive at 9:00 a.m that morning.
Keynote 🔈
I kicked start the meetup with a keynote about the essence of the meet-up and how our audience where so special for taking the time out to attend to improve their knowledge base on the Blockchain. This was also paving the way for Lucky Henry to take a 2-hour session on introduction to the Waves Platform…
Lucky Henry introducing Waves Platform
Lucky Henry in his always passionate decor, introduced Waves Platform to our eager listening audience and they were series of aha moments as they see how Waves worked!
Demo and live coding
After Lucky Henry has tremendously introduced Waves Platform to the audience, we had a brief break session which was followed up by a demo of how to build Smart Contracts using Waves IDE. I used the wallet.ride example to explain the syntax of RIDE and also deployed the Smart Contract on an account on Testnet.
Rounding up and networking
After RIDing on Waves and all, our audience was really energized by the knowledge gotten and there was a series of applause and asking of intelligent questions. As we closed the event for the day, We had pizza 🍕 and drinks and of course series of pictures to capture the event, take a look…
Key takeaways
From the feedback we got from the meet-up, we deduced that there is a significant amount of work needed to propagate the adoption of Waves Technology by African developers and we aren’t naive to think it will all happen overnight. However, we are committed to keeping pushing the envelop until we achieve the set goal — massive adoption of Waves Blockchain.
Checkout Bolingo
Bolingo is a charity, donation and tipping app. It was unraveled at the Waves Lagos meet-up. Check it out
