My Experiences, Challenges and Summary of Activities as a Leader of Azure Nigeria Community

It all started as if I won’t be able to champion the community and her activities for a 3-month period (June — August 2022) when David Okeyode announced my appointment as the leader of the community in June 2022 to succeed Raphael Gab-Momoh who did a fantastic job by leading the community through the successful conduct of the Azure Nigeria Community Conference ’22 (Virtual + In-Person).

I want to use this medium to share some of my experiences, challenges, and a summary of all the activities carried out during my tenure as a community leader.

First of all, let me introduce you to the @Azure Nigeria Community. Azure Nigeria Community is a community of likes-mind whose interest is after the interest of her members focusing on Microsoft Azure Cloud. We organize instructor-led training sessions to help members of the community to grow their skills in using Azure services to prepare them for the real world. We also help to connect members with opportunities that we’re aware of.

My Experience

They say experience is the best teacher. Indeed, it’s truly the best teacher in that, if you don’t experience something, you would have little or nothing to say about it. The leadership role offered me the opportunity to interact with several members of the community and increase my skills, knowledge, and exposure within and outside the Azure Nigeria Community. Indeed, it is good to serve.

The Challenges

Challenges are necessary for lessons to be learned in anything in life. The fact that I am managing a lot of personal activities made playing the role of community leader challenging. Together with my work obligations, these personal activities truly made it difficult for me. I could only overcome the difficulties by extending my sleep time by a few hours😊.

Summary of My Activities

I took over the mantle of leadership officially on Thursday, June 9, 2022, and commenced my first event on Saturday, June 18, 2022. The first event was the Azure Nigeria Community Cloud Resume Challenge, which ran all from Saturday, June 18 to Saturday, July 30, 2022, with various sub-topics which cut across Azure Storage, Azure CDN, Git, GitHub Actions, Azure Functions, Azure CosmosDB, PowerShell, and Azure CLI. The cloud resume challenge was aimed at enabling participants to create an online version of their resume and host it on Azure to help boost their cloud skills. The Azure Cloud Resume Challenge had five live practical demonstration sessions as follows:

1. Azure Nigeria Community Cloud Resume Challenge
2. Review Session for Azure Cloud Resume Challenge
3. Review Session for Azure Cloud Resume Challenge — II
4. INTEGRATING AZURE FUNCTION AND AZURE COSMOS DB WITH AZURE STORAGE STATIC WEBSITE
5. Build and Host a Functional Website on Azure Storage Account

All participants for the cloud resume challenge were added to the community Slack Workspace for support.

In addition to the Azure Cloud Resume Challenge, I also hosted the Az-900 Azure Fundamentals and Az-400 Azure Study Series alongside other leaders in the community. The series was held from Saturday, August 6, 2022, to Sunday, September 4, 2022. It was designed to prepare participants for their certification exams in Azure Fundamentals and Azure DevOps and also gave them. The series featured 9 live sessions. All the 3 modules in the AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals and 5 out of 9 modules in the AZ-400 Azure DevOps learning Path were covered as follows:

1. Describe Cloud Concepts
2. Getting Started on a DevOps Transformation Journey
3. Describing Azure architecture and services
4. Getting Started on a DevOps Transformation Journey PT 2
5. Development for enterprise DevOps
6. Describing Azure management and governance
7. Implement CI with Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions
8. Design and Implement a Release Strategy in Azure DevOps
9. Implement a Secure Continuous Deployment Using Azure Pipelines

The recorded sessions for all the sessions and events can be accessed via the community YouTube channel, watch and subscribe to it.

My anniversary and handover date which will accompany with our leadership meeting is scheduled for Sunday, September 4, 2022. Promise Nwachukwu will take over the mantle of leadership for the community from me.

Hey, lest I forgot the community now has her official LinkedIn page. Kindly follow to stay up to date with our events. Also, join our Meetup page for more events. Follow us and the community on Twitter as well.

Thanks to David Okeyode for appointing me. Special thanks to all my fellow leaders for their support. I acknowledged the key roles played by Raphael Gab-Momoh, Promise Nwachukwu, Oluwaseyi Oluwawumiju, Paul Oyemakinwa, Foyin Olajide Oluwatosin Anishere Aremu Oluwadamilola Joseph Roland, tayo fatoki and many others