[PyCon Ghana 2022] Building a Career in Open Source.
“Akwaaba” means welcome. This word I learnt in Ghana, among many others.
The Python Software Community in Ghana hosted an annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language to learn, collaborate, and share experiences.
As the event seeks to equip and empower society through technology, with Python and other related technologies, Outreachy was invited to empower the event attendees with information on how its program runs and how they could benefit from it. I was asked to represent Outreachy and I chose to speak on “ Building a Career through Open Source Contribution." with the aim of informing people about being an intern and also contributing to open source as a mentor through the Outreachy program.
The program started with the pre-conference, where among other activities that were held, I spoke at the Open Source track, to the Danjo Girls, and at the Women of Open Source (WOSS) session.
The conference then continued with Day 1, where I engaged the event attendees at the Outreachy booth. There were a lot of people from various backgrounds and careers, including programmers, mathematicians, researchers, designers, and tech newbies who were anxious to know more about how they could participate in the outreach internship, and I patiently explained the stages and progress to them.
Day 2 of the conference had other speakers like Nicholas H. Tollervey, Principal Engineer at Anaconda Inc., give the keynote opening speech; Cheuk Ting Ho, a Developer Advocate at Anaconda Inc., also talked about “I hate writing tests, that’s why I use Hypothesis”; To mention a few, other amazing speakers that I learned from include; Ruth Ikegah, who spoke on “Growing your Tech Career in Open Source”; Timi Olayemi, who spoke on "Django Deployer Best Practices: How to deploy your project using AWS and Railwayapp and other awesome lightning talk speakers. I also engaged with event attendees at the Outreachy booth.
The conference reflects the diversity of the Ghana community and facilitates the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experiences that enrich the community. I learned so many new perspectives from this event that will help me improve my work at Outreachy. I will also relate my experience and the discussion I had with the event attendees. This will be discussed with the Outreachy organizers, and we will use it to make informed decisions to better serve our target population.
I will update my report with more details that maybe weren’t captured here (especially facts about the Ghana Jollof, their culture, and history).
