Devcenter Square: How African developers started connecting in the most interesting way
This is the story of Devcenter Square. We cannot talk about what is, without acknowledging or referencing the past. Our initial shot at building a community wasn’t so successful but that’s a story for another day. We hacked up three different online community platforms, as we tried to bring the developers out of their silos. Out of the three, our success came from the least expected source, Slack. Creating an online community was important to us because it had become glaring that the developer community was not very close. Even though there is so much amazing talent out there, a lot of it was going undiscovered and underutilized. I guess Slack worked because it was a natural habitat for developers.
The Slack channel was created in a bid to look for other developers to contribute to a bank parser project. This channel has now grown from 7 early members; Lolu, Onyekachi, Timigod, Opemipo, Kolawole, Olaoluwa, and Myself to 1600+ members with over 400K+ conversations. This growth has been mostly organic, and it has taken very little marketing effort to get to this point.
What we intended to be a simple means of communication among developers has now, on its own, grown and morphed into the largest online developer community in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has evolved from being an engaging community, to what I and many others have come to consider as ‘family’, where the members are actively conversing, sharing ideas and learning how to collaborate.
What makes Square different?
Square which started with only 2 channels; ‘Bank-parser’, and ‘States-and-Cities’, has grown to over 37 channels spanning from programming related topics like ‘PHP’ and ‘Machine Learning’, to ‘Jukebox’ for music sharing and ‘Random’ for banter. Square is unique because it has characteristics that stem from each member, which makes the community work. There is an atmosphere of togetherness that makes almost anything possible. The developers are getting solutions to dev issues they share, almost immediately on the ‘Dev’ channel. They search for jobs, share information, and build open source projects. There is also a sense of belonging, and personal responsibility which is evident with moderation. Most of the members have taken it upon themselves to moderate what goes on within the community. Also, new members who join, get a soft landing as they introduce themselves in the ‘Welcome-and-Greet’ Channel. This usually helps the newcomer navigate their way around very quickly and makes them feel very welcome. The community is not built around “know-it-alls” or “superstar” developers but instead, everyone is treated with respect and there is no prejudice.
After Square took off, we still faced problems because more people talked in private messages than in public, so we tried to facilitate the growth of engagement in the community that all members could benefit from. It was important that we experimented with ideas that we believed would improve public engagement. After trying a couple of trials, we have seen improvements in conversations publicly. For example, we tested the idea of an AMA (Ask Me Anything) but we didn’t want random people being asked random questions, so we named it the “Developer Experience Session (dev-xp-session)”. We have had Tyler Pate the lead mobile engineer and Lily Liu CTO of 21.co join us for a session. During the session, our community members had the opportunity to ask them questions centered around the microtasking economy, digital currency and the engineering process at 21.co. We have also talked to Africa’s talking about their APIs to reduce the hassle of integrating telecommunication services into applications. Biggest of all, we had Yele Bademosi launch his fund for technical founders, Microtraction on the Devcenter Square community.
We have also made efforts of connecting Square members offline. We held a hackathon event in collaboration with Access Bank to launch Africa Fintech Foundry which was an accelerator geared towards funding and nurturing fintech startups in Nigeria. We also helped organize the tensor flow event in collaboration with Google Nigeria and got mentioned at the GDG Summit in San Francisco late last year.
Where is Square heading?
I find what lies ahead to be very exciting. We are getting closer to the ideal community we want to build, and we want to make this community something that is very valuable to every single member. The Devcenter Square community has already given so much more than we deserve, and we owe it to every member to give back and make it a truly African community. Eventually, I will share the community manifesto and how we plan to expand our support system to be the backbone of African developers.
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