Building a Career in Software Development
some takeaways from the first forloopZambia meetup of the year.
This was the first meetup that forloopZambia had in 2019, we had spent much time preparing to make sure we deliver the best content and talks to the community.
As part of forloopAfrica expansion across the continent, Our focus on helping build a developer community has been to make sure the community members learn something that improves the way they do things, and that is why we have had several meetups emphasizing on building the right way and the impact is happening and we are looking in more ways on how we can work other local communities to engage and reach more people.
We invited speakers who have experience in the industry both in Software Development and Entrepreneurship with the aim of motivating the attendees in chasing their dreams and work hard to achieve the impossible.
It was an overwhelming attendance of 56 developers mixed with students which really shows how the community is growing and the need to learn more, the venue was full that we had to put more chairs outside and others had to stand.
Fraud Detection with Pendo Manjele
Our first speaker was Pendo Manjele who is currently a @developer-circles-lusaka lead and she has been very active in the community in increasing the female participation in the developer meetups and this includes training them, her talk was on Data Science, and this wasn't just a talk but a live demo on fraud detection in python.
Live coding isn't an easy thing but the way she did blew us away and we hope to have many such presentations in our future events.
The Story of ZPOS with Chisepo Chirwa
Every successful company has its roots and its inspiring background, Chisepo The CEO of ZPOS told a story of how they grew from zero to a point where they provide a stable system that helps small scale businesses manage their sales through a POS(Point of Sale), It was an inspiring story to hear that shows how possible it is to come out of your comfortable zone, chase your dream and work towards it until you reach your goal.
The interesting part of ZPOS is that most of the developers have the option of work remotely.
Building a Career with Kazashim Kuzasuwat
Kazashim is an entrepreneur and he is the founder of Cynojine he did a remote talk and it was much focused on how you can build your career as a software developer, some major take away from his talk included:
- work on your own project
- value your reputation
- Join online communities
- Get experience at a big company
- etc …
Having side projects or your own website is always solid advice, whether you’re currently looking for a job, in a job or freelancing. Your own development projects will show your true passions and help you up skill in your spare time.
Experience from Women in tech series with Sambwah Chipungu
Sambwah Chipungu shared her experience from the women in tech conference she attended in Durban, South Africa and the need for testing applications and what really are testing frameworks.
OpenSource Contribution and Collaboration using git and GitHub.
We ended the meetup with an interesting exercise, since some of the attendees were students and didn’t have GitHub accounts we made sure that everyone created an account with GitHub, proceeded to explain on how git works and why everyone needs version control system like git.
Mbuyu Makayi mentioned an important point about GitHub.
Your GitHub profile could serve as your cv to prove to your future recruiter your worth. — Mbuyu
One of the reasons why most people don't contribute to opensource is because they don't feel confident and comfortable enough to dive into someone's code, and sometimes it could be that it is because one doesn't know the procedure of submitting a pull request.
Our aim was to have everyone submit a pull request to a project that doesn't belong to them, and we guided everyone through the process and it was very exciting to see how many pull requests came in.
The feedback we got after the meetup was that it now makes sense, to most collaboration seemed strange and overwhelming to them and it had never made how one can make contribution to open source and work with people they aren't physically together.
It now makes sense
More photos
What's next
We are planning to have more engaging meetups and we want to closely work with the community members to give them a voice where they can their ideas and some cool things they are working on, we are also planning to have hackathons and more collaboration.
Much appreciation to our local sponsor BongoHive, this meetup wouldn't have been possible with them, and their continued support to local developer communities is unmatched.
