Building the Laravel Nigeria community with over 150+ attending the first meetup
*Update*: You can check out the Laravel Nigeria website for all the latest meetups, speakers and past talks.
Early March 2017, I spoke to Prosper about creating a community of Laravel developers in Nigeria. Since then we (along with Christian, Lynda and Lawrence) have been planning a Laravel Nigeria meetup, and boy was it successful!
There have been many tech meetups like forLoop and NgNigeria, which have taken off in Nigeria. The hunger of the Nigerian software developer is huge and it is very difficult to satisfy. Last year, me and Mark started an internship program and the maiden edition had over 300 people applying, and the second one in January? Over 1000+ people applied! That is insane!
How we organized the Laravel Nigeria meet-up
One of the goals we set out to achieve was to raise the standards. The meetup trend is very much in its infancy and so there is much to be done. We wanted to be the standard by which all other meetups are measured.
We first started by setting up the meetup page where people could join the community and also where people could RSVP to the meetup page. We started getting people joining almost immediately.
We started by trying to get bigger venues. Before our meetup, Mark (who has been instrumental in developing the tech ecosystem) offered the Hotels.ng office for meetups. This had been working fine until the community became too big to use the office. So we already anticipated Laravel Nigeria would not be any smaller, so we wanted to get a bigger space.
We sent out tweets asking for support and there were positive responses from organisations who were interested in helping out. Switch.ng had the biggest space and thus we went with them. However, close to the event date, there was an oversight and turned out there was a hackathon holding there and we reached out to Andela and they graciously offered to sponsor the location! We were stoked. It is a really great building.
Pusher was also very instrumental in the success of Laravel Nigeria. Many meetups have had something critical lacking before ours. They were not documented so many people who could not attend effectively missed out.
Pusher sponsored the coverage of the event and will also host the video on their Sessions platform. That is simply amazing! Anyone can watch it once it is uploaded! Oh they also sent Swag! A lot of stickers and shirts too. They were simply amazing.
Other sponsors that helped out a lot are Gigalayer who provided free domain name registration and hosting (which we will be using to create the website for the second edition) and also Findworka who provided refreshment for the attendees. 🍾
After that we had speakers who were authorities in their fields prepare various talks on Laravel related topics. Their slides are available here.
How people perceived the event
The event was massive and at some point started trending on Twitter Lagos. Whuttt!! Here are some of the reactions from people that attended the first Laravel Nigeria meetup.
This is just a tip of the iceberg. Go to this page to see all the reactions from the event.
What is in store for the next meetup and when?
We hope to have the next meetup in June. The specific date would be announced on Twitter and on the Meetup community page, so please follow us on both platforms to get updates.
We hope to get even more sponsors, play even more Kahoot!, have a lot of refreshment; and of course learn a lot from the speakers that would be giving talks on that day.
Do you want to miss the next meetup? I don’t think you want to. Even if you do you are sure you will be able to catch a replay of the experience on YouTube and the talks on Pusher Sessions.
Were you at the event, share your experience below and please share and recommend this article so others can see and participate. The more the merrier.
