unStack Africa conference 3.0 — Everything you need to know
It was on the 6th of November, 2021 when the unStack Africa Conference 2021 was held. For those of you who do not know, unStack is an Open-source based conference for designers, developers and every technical talent from around the globe. It features technical talks, workshops, networking, etc.
I was so excited to attend the program cause I haven’t attended a tech physical conference not since the covid-19 pandemic. Although there was the ‘virtual side’ of the program, I decided to attend the program physically cause I have missed the excitement of being in the gathering of like-minded developers. I learnt alot from the program, some of which I am going to share below.
The venue was at Silverbird cinemas at Ikeja City Mall, Lagos. When we got there (I went there with my friend James who is an Author and a Designer, you can reach him through his twitter handle: “@jamesokpare”), the volunteers were so welcoming, they scanned our QR code and ushered us in, we got there around 10:30am. I’m glad we got there early because after a while the whole place was crowded and some couldn’t even find a place to sit.
Why projects fail
By the time we entered the Hall, Matt Velloso (the Technical Advisor to the CEO of Microsoft) was already speaking. He spoke alot about why projects fail. Contrary to what people think, he said projects don’t fail because the developers aren’t so good with their stacks but more often than not it’s because the team lacks some soft skills. As developers when you make a mistake, are you able to accept and correct them or do you feel you are always right, he mentioned this attitude can play out when we are too attached to our stack (the tools we use) and aren’t willingly to see other sides. He also mentioned that apart from the work we do as developers, we should also strive to be in environment which is very supportive. Having a good technical skill but being in an unsupportive environment can depreciate the quality of the work we do and in turn, result in failed projects.
Building an exchange
Next up was Jude Dike, the CEO of GetEquity. Jude talked about How to build exchanges. Stating that an exchange is a group of assets which comprises of:
- Name: The main name of the assets, e.g Bitcoin.
- Symbol: The short form of the name, e.g BTC.
- Supply: How much of it is in supply, as at the time of this writing, bitcoin supply is:
- Price: The price of 1 assets, e.g the price of 1 bitcoin.
He talked the Order book (which is the list of prices that buyers are currently bidding for and sellers are currently asking for), Limit and Market Order. He gave an illustration of a market order; a market order is like going to a local market to buy an item and as you walk in, whatever price the market has currently placed on that item is what you go for without negotiating the price. While a limit order is like saying you don’t want to buy an item above a certain price, so you might have to wait for the price to go down or find someone who is willing to trade the asset at your desired price.
After that he answered a where someone asked how do we get investors for our startup? He mentioned that before proposing your startup to the ‘big VCs’, it will be good to get some leverage first. This means that it is better to get some traction first, this can mean getting funds from Family and Friends, otherwise it may be difficult to get the VCs by your side and ofcourse is second point was to list the startup on GetEquity. Jude’s talk was interactive but he used alot of curse words lol.
Sourcegraph
After Jude Dike, Prosper Otemuyiwa followed. Prosper is the Co-founder & CTO of Eden Life and also a Staff Developer Advocate for Sourcegraph. Prosper talked extensively about Sourcegraph.
Sourcegraph is a web-based search tool that allows you to search through your organization’s code in one place. It can also search public repos on Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. This tool can be very useful in various scenarios:
- Your organization has a large code base and you want search for a line of code not knowing exactly where it is.
- You are using a library which is a bit buggy and you want to see how other people on the internet solved it. Just typing in the name of the library brings out lots of code examples where people have used it.
- When you want to search for some code blocks in just a particular language.
- You need code intelligence while searching for a block of code online. (What most people would otherwise do is to clone the code into their IDE because of the code sense it gives. But how many projects do you want to clone if you need to search through lots of codebase. You need an easier way? Enter Sourcegraph).
- When you need to make changes across your different repositories. What most people might do now is to go into each repositories, edit the file and summit PR for each of them. But with sourcegraph, you can modify codes across all of your repositories at once, for example, when you want to update a particular library, modify configuration files, etc.
With Sourcegraph, there are three main ways you can do your search.
A. Literal Search: You use this when you looking for the exact match of your search query. For example, you type in “makePayment”. This returns the search result of just makePayment, maybe where it was used as a method or class.
B. Regular Expressions: This is a powerful way to search through your codebase. For example, if you want to search for color codes, you can type in “#[a-z0–9]{6} lang:dart”. This will give you color codes that have been used in different dart repositories.
C. Structural Search: This type of search helps when you want to take into account the structure of your code, regular expressions might complicate matters if you want to use them for this type of search. For example, you type in “makePayment(amount, …) lang:dart” the search result returns you the places where the method makePayment is used AND of which amount is the first argument with zero or more additional arguments.
Interestingly you can even copy out a block of code and paste it in the search bar of sourcegraph and you will get relevant results.
I have heard of sourcegraph before the event but I haven’t really tried it out. Listening to Prosper talk about it gave me the inspiration to use it and see. Funny enough, I was in a kind of situation as no 2 point above. I pasted the library in sourcegraph and I saw how other people have used the library and found a way around the bug. I would start using Sourcegraph from now moving forward.
Convoy
Subomi Oluwalana was our next speaker. Subomi spoke about Convoy and it’s possibilities. Convoy is a cloud native webhook service. He noted that things like Security, Reliability, Debugging, Monitoring as the issues that webhooks face. He ‘demoed’ convoy with convoy’s playground, our fingers were all crossed including Subomi wondering whether the live demo going to work or not, eventually it returned 200 OK (for the non-techies, that means it worked!).
Around 1:00pm Shodipo Ayomide the Co-founder of unStack africa came on stage to give a sponsors talk. We had 5 sponsors for the events:
Open Source
Samson Goddy was our next speaker. He spoke about Growing with Open Source. He is also the Director of Community Relations at Sourcegraph. When he first got on stage he threw a question at the audience, “what is that one barrier that is stopping you from contributing to open source”. Lots of answers were given, some of them were:
- I don’t know where to find a suitable open source project for me to contribute to.
- I noticed that most that I send a PR it takes ages for it to be merged.
- I can’t find an open source project that will allow become a technical writer for that writer.
He mentioned that when contributing to open source, we should focus on quality not quantity, we shouldn’t make a PR that will that seems to change the entirety of the codebase, creating small PRs encourages the code reviewers to review and merge your code. If for some reason our code is not merged we should also realize that maintenance can sometimes take alot of time. He told us that apart from finding an open source to contribute to, finding the community around that project is equally important, interacting with people in that community can sometimes give you an edge.
Samson Goddy also spoke about his journey into open source which was very inspiring. He said back then when he started having access to the internet was a bit of an hassle, it was in those days when you had to by time in the internet cafe to be able to connect to the internet, lol he said his laptop back then was about 1 GB of RAM (I mean, 1GB? 😲). He spoke about how open source helped while applying for jobs, he was very proud to share the public links of the different projects he has worked on, this definitely gave him an edge.
Finally he urged us to open source our growth which means that we should keep writing about our progress and any new thing we learn. (He also gave out stickers by the way).
Using Axios in Vue
Next up, we had our only female speaker for the event Ifeoma Nwosu. Ifeoma is a Front-End engineer and Chapter lead at VueVixensNG, she talked on Making HTTP Calls in a Vue App Using Axios.
Axios is a vue library used for http communication and for API consumption. Ifeoma not only talked about Axios but did a live demo of it. I think it was one of the few live coding sessions we had at the event on Saturday. For demonstrating how to use Axios, she made use of the Dog API to get a list of dog images.
The CaaS Model
The last session was taken by Aniedi Udo-Obong. Aniedi is a Program Manager at Google and has been working with Google for over 6 years now. Aniedi spoke about The CaaS Model: Why Collaboration is a Win-Win For All. CaaS means “Community as a Service”. He also talked a bit about Cloud Computing, Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Service(Paas), Software as a service (Saas).
He mentioned that some are so far ahead of the game in building community that there would be no need to build a new one from scratch, we can just leverage on it. There is a already an huge community, if you have a product you are building, you can talk to the leads in the community, share your product with them and just tell them ‘retweet aggressively”. Even if you are building another community, offering trainings, offering mentor-ship, remember that you don’t have to build the bare metal yourself, the community exists and there is Community as a Service model you can use to aggressively retweet your message.
Aniedi answered a question where a participant asked that it looks like it is very difficult for anyone to be break into the community because it seems the community has like a ‘link of OGs’ so if you are not in ‘their circle’ you won’t get the attention you want. Aniedi said alot of points to answer the question but some key points he said was, when you ask for something ‘who are you?’. This means what are the things you are already doing in the community, what work have you done on your own at first, where have you volunteered. He also said ‘who is speaking for you?’ referring to Prosper’s article: Who is speaking on your behalf? Who can speak for you behind close doors, who can vouch for you even when you are not there. This things always give you an edge when you reach to the leads in community requesting for something or the other.
Aniedi ended his talk by saying something that hit me, I must have heard it before but it hit different when Aniedi said it…”If you want to get something you have never gotten before, you have to do something you haven’t done before.”
Closing session
After the speakers finished with their talks. Charles came on stage and encouraged us to give our feedback for the event here. Charles is the CEO of SpireAfrica, the product that allows you collect all of your users’ feedback in one place. Then Adora, the co-founder of unStack called up Samson Goddy on stage to come and anchor the giveaway session. Adora was giving away 15 of her book: Cloud Engineering for Beginners. You can get her book here. Samson threw some questions out and gave out the book to those who answered, then he picked a random person from the hall and asked that person to pick other people at random to the get the book (although I raised up my hand all through, I didn’t get the book😩).
Here are some few pictures from the event 😊
