forLoop Zambia Launch: An Amazing Run down
ForLoop Zambia finally launched on the 7th of July,2018 and it doesn’t go without saying that this event was indeed a blast! The event began at 10:30am at Alliance Francaise in Lusaka, Zambia under the theme “How to get ahead with your career development as a developer”.
It was a very cold morning and I kept wondering whether people would show up but it was amazing to see the number of people that started showing up as early as 09:50am.
This clearly shows how many people out there are passionate about software development and how to grow their skills which is quiet really remarkable.
The event was hosted by Olivier J.M and I with the help of BongoHive, Zambia’s first technology and Innovation hub. We had the opportunity to meet Remy Muhire who traveled all the way from Rwanda to be with us during the launch and he was of great help.
We had four speakers of which Silumesii Maboshe , Co-Founder of BongoHive took the position of first speaker. He gave a warm welcome to every one and went on to speak about programming in Zambia and Communities of Developers; their importance and why people should get engaged in such groups. It was an interesting speech and I could see the excitement on everyone’s faces — the best way to hype people up.
Mukuma Musenge the Co-Founder of Agora Innovatus and Agora Code Community was our second speaker who spoke passionately about The good,The bad and the ugly sides of Developer Advocacy. He spoke boldly of the importance to engage with development communities. Beyond school, work, we need to find other ways to reach out to fellow developers. Among other things, we also got to hear on the value of Advocacy. It was an interesting topic and so awakening.
It was already 12am at the time our second speaker was concluding and straight after that, we had a 20 minutes break. During this time, we allowed everyone to interact and get to know one another and ask further questions where they needed clarity. Everyone was having a good time.
After the break, we had Rwanda’s very own Remy Muhire, CTO of Exuus Rwanda as our third speaker. He gave a brief background of ForLoop Africa, its aim and vision. He also gave a brief narration of how the fire landed in Rwanda during their launch. Everyone was very attentive and eager to learn more about ForLoop and what it has to offer. He received a number of interesting questions from the audience and he answered every single one of them — very captivating.
Our Fourth speaker was a beautiful young lady by the name of Cynthia Mulenga M. She is not only beautiful,she writes code too — Interesting. Cynthia is a back-end developer, mentor and also one of the leads of Developer Circle Lusaka. Her talk was about “Avoiding burnout as a Developer”. It was a very engaging topic as she highlighted on the many ways of avoiding burnout and how to treat it in the case where one suffers from it. She added on to say that a good diet and daily exercise is core to this and there was an exchange of views from the audience. It was very pleasing to hear what other developers do to treat burnout.
We had our final talk by Remy Muhire with the title “Scaling Yourself by writing clean code”. He gave a brief introduction about himself and when he started coding. He went on and advised everyone on the importance of writing clean code and the advantages it comes with. He gave an illustration of a sample of clean code and how you can keep your code short but still give the same desired results. He went on to give a scenario where an application consists of a lot of “instructions” ( your code). If a request comes in, your code will start doing a bunch of things ( processing) in order to finally respond with the appropriate output.
The amount of requests your server is able to respond to is limited by the capacity of the hardware, so you’ll want to keep “what the machine has to do to service the request” as simple as possible, even if the machine is capable of doing a lot. This way, it can handle more requests.
To conclude, he added “Comments are a sign of bad Coding”. — I mean, if your code is straight to the point,why explain what it’s doing?
We were coming to the end of the event and we allowed the developers to ask questions where they needed clarity and we exchanged ideas on all the topics that were discussed.
Finally Olivier J.M and I thanked everyone who joined us during the ForLoop Zambia Launch and encouraged them to join us at our next meetups. We then took a group photo and invited everyone to have some snacks as the interaction continued.
Lastly, I would like to thank our ForLoop Africa heads Prosper Otemuyiwa , Ridwan Olalere for making everything possible, BongoHive for making sure we had our venue arranged, our speakers Silumesii Maboshe, Mukuma Musenge, Cynthia Mulenga M. and our Rwandan brother Remy Muhire for the awesome topics, my fellow host Olivier J.M and everyone who helped this event be successful.
To our developers who moved in the cold just to join us, thank you so much and to everyone who attended, special thanks goes to you and hope to see you at our next meet ups.
And this is how forLoop rained in Zambia. Feel free to give us feedback of the event and what you would like us to improve on our coming events.
HAPPY CODING :)
