Starting off a new Linux Paradigm
Linux Lagos is a meetup organised by James John, Bakare Emmanuel, Habeeb Kehinde Shopeju, Bolaji, Olayinka Peter and Lagos Nomad to change the narrative of the Nigerian Community around Linux and its surrounding stacks like DevOps. These narratives offer poor visibility into the real dynamic of what these skills really employ and how to go about being “badass” at a largely needed skillset.
Why Did This Begin?
The grand scale of the meetup began as a joke on Twitter with others like Bakare Emmanuel posting of the lacking number of a proper Linux community in Nigeria amidst the numerous tech communities all diversified towards web development majorly.
Linux Lagos was a meetup jointly organised by James John in the past months for which two events had happened. Despite the lacking Linux skillset, the numbers in attendance never did commensurate with desire for it.
The KICK OFF
Running a state wide meetup is no easy job, so we set out to get the interest of people in a Linux meetup.
Upon further questions amongst tech leaders and communities with contributions from Aniedi Udo-Obong, Femi TAIWO etc., we further discovered that there were no Linux communities.
Big companies and organisations also had no Linux or DevOps program employed functionality for their perusal or community involvement. This led to an incredible push for the event which started off as a joke with an 80% acceptance rate that we ranked as phenomenal.
Comments like this confirmed our opinion and many others as such geared us to lead a change in the community towards this.
Moving With The Forces
After much deliberation on the outlook for the meetup, we saw a couple loopholes in the way meetups are generally organised around:
- Lack of aggressive continuity (durations of occurrence are sparse, events in 1–3 months)
- No detailed curriculum for future events (same meet-up covers the topics from the last one)
- Too many meet-ups doing the same thing (rather than create another niche, partner with many that follow the same technology / goal)
These were the challenges that we considered before kicking off the event and we’ve taken this into consideration for future events.
Kicking It Off
We pushed on to getting mentors as a community is as developed as the people powering it.
The form was put out for all persons in different locations, out of the 20+ members that applied, 10 were screened and chosen based on the statistics inquired during the application process.
This was important because in the coming months, a majority of the content and lectures would be majorly handled by community involvement and we would like ironclad experience to properly educate others who would be in mentor positions with added practice.
Partnerships For The Better
The best part of a community is everyone knows everyone, the benefits of recurring partnerships cannot be over-emphasised.
Linux Lagos as body holds no other part but an effort by multiple bodies to support the lacking knowledge gap in skilled enterprise support for the technology.
Before the first launch, several efforts were made to meet with the best and brightest organisations already leading the Open Source, Linux and Cloud Space.
Our first supporters are shown below:
🔗 OSCA
First rounds go to the OSCA team for the fine support, the team is run by Samson Goddy, Ada Nduka Oyom and Peace Ojemeh (Perrie).
Linux is the prime open source technology and this partnership was made to happen.
Special thanks also the support from Google Cloud Lagos which currently facilitates the logistics for the 2 week periods in which the meet-up holds.
Another big ups to DevCareers for the mentoring support as we roll out through cohorts in the coming months.
Alongside Linux is CyberSecurity, and we see this as a desired path towards forward progress in the Linux community. We appreciate the support of L4Sec and the 🔗curriculum pre-drafted for the security sessions we’d be having in the second cohort.
Along this and many more are what we look forward to furthering in this grand community partnership with various other organisations.
Less Talk, More Work
We started off the meet-up posting the first event banner at the peak of January.
This garnered a lot of social media presence with over 200 signups alone within the first two days, our capacity was peaked at 100.
The support for this was really encouraging and we appreciate the community for the mass push towards attending the meetup.
We Launched A Curriculum
As promised, we have a plan for the future and all is documented in the Linux Lagos repo for public review, Pull Requests (PRs) are very welcome for the content outlined.
How The First Event Went, Recap Edition
The first event happened at NGHUB starting off at 10am as promised, with no African time.
The event quickly filled up at the peak of 10am leaving us with little space for further attendance.
Majority of the time during this first meetup was dedicated towards getting with
— Getting Started With Linux
— Installing Linux using either the WSL or VirtualBox
— Understanding What An ISO Image Is
— An Introduction To CyberSecurity With Linux
The meetup continued with James John breaking down the installation process for Linux on Virtualbox, WSL etc and gave an introduction to the Linux environment using the terminal etc.
Wole Olakanmi [Lagos Nomad], lead of L4Sec also came up to give all attendees an introduction to the security curriculum, how Linux comes into Security and the career paths that come about from such engagements.
Lunch followed and the conversations on using the Linux shell environment continued.
This continued till 1:58PM after which there was a final note on steps for the meetup by Bakare Emmanuel
He spoke on Linux, how it’s a kernel as opposed to the convention of an Operating System along with a showcase of Termux, an open terminal emulator for Android. Beyond these steps were talks on the meetup and how it would progress in the coming weeks.
So What’s Next?
We extend apologies to those who could not attend the first meetup due to NGHUBs attendance policies. As of now, we’ve moved from there to a more prestigious venue being Semicolon Africa, further details are embodied in the tweet below:
As of next week, lessons begin in full force and we’d be covering “An Introduction to APT” with several points on what packages are in Linux and how to effectively use the tool to resolve app installation issues.
Till then, keep the Tux going with Linux.
Photos & Presentations
- Meetup Photo Album —https://photos.app.goo.gl/cvicGY5kKiZHSxe2A
Special Thanks
- Andela, for the special visit on further partnerships
- The whole attendees and lovers of Linux who made this possible
- AKINJOBI Sodiq for taking these nice photo shots
- Lots of other friends for their support and encouragement. We will keep something like this alive, we are just starting!
