The Rise of Girls Get Geeky ~ Kisumu
What is Girls Get Geeky you ask? 😃 Well I’ll be happy to tell.
Girls Get Geeky is an idea that was brought to life by a team of 5 techies residing in Kisumu. The best ideas are usually incepted from a problem that needs a solution right? So here’s why. There was, pardon me, there still is a dire need for lady techies to feel the gap of successful women in the Technology industry. And it’s not just limited to Kisumu, this is all over Kenya and even beyond.
To be honest, the tech industry has always been perceived as a male dominated field, which is not all that false. Girls Get Geeky seeks to change this perception and ultimately mutate it in reality too.
So in June 2018, 5 techies brought their minds together to come up with a way forward for the already born idea. None of us wasted time on this since we were so motivated by it. Fine, who am I kidding, let’s be honest here. Some of us were a little bit skeptical about the idea generally. I mean we were about to plan an event in Kisumu, a place where you’d only hear crickets screech when you ask about its technology economy. It was creepy. It was risky. It needed this… It was the perfect place to start.
Our fears eventually turned to more reasons why Kisumu needed Girls Get Geeky. Our major concern now was the turn up. Is anyone going to show up? what if they don’t? what if they actually do? So it was one emotion after the other. This build us. This made us feel the thrill of doing something daring for the first time. It was totally worth it.
In late June we started reaching out to various Tech platforms and recognized industries that could grant us sponsorship for the event. This was a nerve wrecking part. We sent out so many proposals and at the start, most of them were not as encouraging as we’d thought them to be. However with time we started getting approvals and eventually we had 4 tech companies willing to sponsor.
The signups were overwhelming!. By mid July the 70 seat slots were already fully booked so we increased the booking tickets to 100, and all those got filled up too! We knew we were ready. And it was exciting!
The event began at exactly 9 a.m with refreshments and breakfast while Organizers and sponsors gave speeches to the attendees. For sponsorship, we had TravisCI, GitLab , Andela, Africa’s Talking Ltd and @podiihq . Attendees enjoyed listening to the various technologies they weren’t quite familiar with. Immediately after the last sponsor, we had a psyche up session where everyone was to dance and play games for 10 minutes. We then had Linda Achieng' present about the MVC architecture that they would fully see in play during the workshop sessions afterwards. They had a chance of meeting their coaches since we introduced them and immediately after, they broke to groups of at most 5people, each with a coach depending on their interests on either Ruby or Python.
The workshop sessions were so involving and responsive. It was clear that everyone who attended this event had a motive of learning something new. When we got to lunch hour, no one wanted to leave. They were so involved in the coding sessions that they felt wasted to leave it halfway. So we had to reconsider and promise them a brief session in the afternoon to finish building their workshop applications.
Lunch was awesooommeee! And more than enough. 😋😋😋😋😋😋
In the afternoon we had to let them finish building their applications and at 3p.m they had a USSD, SMS and Voice APIs training session for about an hour by Africa's Talking. This brought life to a challenge, ‘The Girls Get Geeky Challenge’ where attendees would later on have to create an application in either Ruby or Python that could send an SMS to selected numbers in the contact list. They would then create a pull request to a major repository and be ranked by authentic code and on first come basis. The winner of this challenge would then receive a pair of the best Headphones in the market. This was good enough to kick start their coding journey!
Girls Get Geeky Kisumu ended at 4:30 p.m but there was still time for some crazy selfies.
We had the coaches dinner in the evening for about two to three hours and everyone left for home.
I’m still marveled at the turn up in Kisumu. We are already in the verge of planning our next Girls Get Geeky event in Nakuru Early next year. We pray it’ll be as good, if not better than Kisumu.
Thank you so much for your support. We couldn’t have done it without the help!
Girls Get Geeky~Nakuru coming soon!
