Code9ty Meetup 150km from home base

Why this far?

sigu
code9ty

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At one of Kenya’s top bootcamps, code9ty, we’re always looking for ways to bring coding to remote communities. We realized there is no developer community in Kisumu and its surroundings so we decided to build one. These members will also be a part of the larger LakeHub communities which include techies and creatives. The best target for this is university students who need mentorship and have enough time to attend meetups. These students will one day start looking for jobs and will likely struggle without the injection of real job skills that they could receive from code9ty.

These same students will one day start working , and we envision them as part of our larger community of code9ty graduates.

One of our students during the previous code9ty cohort was from Rongo University and for the past two months she has been able to form a community which meets every day for two hours to teach each other how to code (which is so impressive). We then decided to help her in building the community by visiting them and giving them encouragement.

What we did

  • Testing in Ruby — members presented an overview on how to do testing in RSpec, Capybara and Cucumber. We covered single sign on using Twitter too — we rock! . Single day meetups are not long enough to get a complete beginner up to speed but its long enough to spark curiosity in them and long enough to give someone an idea of how it is implemented.
  • We tried a puzzle — The Tower of Hanoi puzzle using 8 disks. This was to send a message that all complex problems should be broken down into small understandable pieces.
Trying to sketch out tower on hanoi puzzle
  • We danced — Dancing brings happiness, we did it to our best.

So, what was the impact?

I still clearly remember this guy’s words (Robert Kimeto — pictured below):

You guys have really encouraged me and given me hope, I will start coding and preach this gospel to others too.

Robert Kimeto funnily saying he is now ‘born again’ into code

Pheobe Chirchir:

So I can start coding right now? I am happy to know I am not late to this party

Reuben Ndegwa:

I am happy you guys came, would love to join you at code9ty once I am done with my final year

18 of those we met have planned to attend an event organized by google through LakeHub - which we are proud to be a part of. This event is called the google developers festival.

This is not all, I am sending a follow up email where they can fill in a short survey to capture exactly what they thought.

Are there more of these?

This is the second meeting of the monthly meetups, being the group of techies we decided to call our meetups ‘collisions’ and give them alphabetical ruby gem names.

  1. Collision ‘ActionPack’ at LakeHub
  2. Collision ‘Byebug’ at Rongo University
  3. Next is Collision ‘Capybara’ at Masinde Muliro University

We plan on doing these every month at different universities. We plan to make them as fun as possible while still growing the community.

From the rate at which we are growing, we decided to have a Slack team to enable constant communication with students from all these universities.

Want to learn how to write code? checkout what we cover in code9ty. This is part of the fun we have while learning

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sigu
code9ty

Software application developer, found new craze in functional programming.