How the fire landed in Kigali : #ForloopRwanda a short recap
On 21 April 2018, the history was made in Rwanda tech community as more than 70 people came to attend the maiden edition of #forLoopRwanda.
The Event started at 12 PM at Carnegie Mellon University Africa (The temple of science and technology in East Africa )in Kacyiru with the theme: Becoming a world-class software developer.
I had the privilege to host the event with Remy Muhire and I was rushing to be sure that everything was ready and everyone was ready to be baptized with fire.
For the past few weeks, I spent my time tweeting about the event and inviting everyone I know in Kigali who might be interested in the event and be sure that I have reached every software developer in Kigali.
We had five speakers who come from different places in Africa; the event was moderated by Solomon Kitumba , the community manager of InnovationVillage in Kampala, the largest coworking space in East Africa.
The first speaker was Funsho, the CTO of BellaNaija (The largest news website In Nigeria ), he talked about technical habits of a world-class software developer.
Folks were concentrated and some of them took notes about useful tips that he told us such as using version control, code review, etc. you can find his slide here
Then Comes Lorna Maria, the lead data scientist from Pollicy in Uganda, after teaching us some yoga poses, she gave a presentation on how to use data to leverage our customers. She told us how to analyse our customer’s habits and preferences with data in order to build a better product for them. You can find her slides here.
Remy Muhire the CTO of Exuus Rwanda was our first local speaker at the event, he taught us how to build better APIS. We learned a lot in his slides .We learned about best practices for designing API, such as documentation, always building REST API instead of SOAP and so forth. You can find his slides here.
We had a break session and ate some Sambusa and drunk sodas, in order to be sure that everyone is ready for the next session. Specials thanks to our sponsors, Flutterwave , Cloudinary, Gigalayers and Africa’s Talking Ltd for everything they are doing for the dev community in Africa.
After the break our moderator, the king Solomon Kitumba talked about the hustle in startup life and how he became a serial entrepreneur. It was a very good interactive session and we shared our thoughts about apple products. I’m sure everyone drew profit from that and was ready to start his own startup. You can find his slide here.
The last presentation was with Victor Akinwande a brilliant student from CMU Africa, who showed us the theory about neural networks and deep learning. Floks were very interested because he made those things easy for everyone.
The event ended with swags distribution , a very good selfie session and a talk about ours sponsors.
Specials thanks to everyone who made this possible : The forLoop Africa Daddies (Prosper Otemuyiwa and Ridwan Olalere ), CMU africa authorities (Ines Manzi and Farida ) , CMU students (Kesa Oluwafunmilola , Dieume Hirwa , Victor Akinwande and Joan Kirunga), our lead Organizer and the man who took care of ours guest Remy Muhire, Ours speakers (Funsho, Solomon Kitumba, Lorna Maria A, Victor Akinwande) , to everyone who came (Uwonkunda Patrick, @Oasis Agano , @EyeWriteCode , @EmmanuelT_ , Mutoni , just to name some ) and of course to me for the hard work I did.
MURAKOZE CYANE!!!!!
All of us deserves accolades.
Just feel free to give us feedback in this form to tell us how the event was and what we can improve in the next event …
See you then.
And this is how fire rained 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 in Kigali ……
