Beating 2020 at its own game

This year would probably go down as one of the most eventful years in our lives. From the wildfires, the deaths of famous people, COVID-19, to the #ENDSARS protests and recession in the country, we’ve all been through a lot. But within this same year, there have also been self-discoveries, progress, growth, relationships, friendships have been made and beautiful things occurring. In all of these, we at DSC Unilag also had our share.

Proceeding in the good works that started last year from the previous lead, we had several events. The first event of this year was Google’s HashCode, a competition for solving engineering problems. Then we partnered with Engineering Career Expo (ECX) in the Faculty of Engineering for an 8-week Bootcamp for six tracks.

Then COVID-19 came and we had to undergo a lockdown which made everyone sit at home, but this didn’t stop learning and progress in our community. We switched to virtual events as the world was forced to go virtual. We hosted a lot of virtual events such as International Women’s Day, Getting started with TensorFlow, CRUD Operations with Firebase, AMA sessions with experts in tech, among others. We also had a 30 Days of Code challenge in collaboration with ECX to test the knowledge of the students in the bootcamp class. We extended participation to everyone also as it was virtual.

The previous lead ended his tenure by hosting Open Hack Week, a week-long event for building solutions for SMEs and companies. This year’s edition was hosted for 2 weeks and at the end of the event, over 15 solutions were built, some of which are still undergoing development.

The new lead for the 2020 session was announced on the 18th of August and on the 1st of September, the new lead, Ifihan Olusheye started her tenure. She continued in the good path left behind by the previous lead by keeping the name of the community high, kicking off her tenure by hosting a virtual Info Session to sensitize the new and existing members on what DSC is all about. The virtual stage was shared with Erica Hanson (DSC Global Head), Aniedi Udo-Obong (Developer Relations, Google), Dr. Victor Odemuyiwa (Director of CITS, University of Lagos) among others.

Afterward, Study Groups, a learning platform built with the aim of studying in groups with the supervision of tutors, commenced; assignments and projects would be given out to test the skills of students in the groups. The first batch started with 7 tracks: HTML & CSS, JavaScript, Python, Game Development, UI, Cyber Security, and Mobile (Kotlin and Flutter). All tracks were beginner-friendly. In the course of this study group, several students got to build big projects for the community.

October came, the month of HacktoberFest, an event for contributing to Open Source. Unfortunately, we were unable to hold ours due to the state of the nation. The event was moved to November and was titled “Getting started with OpenSource’’ where we had Shedrack Akintayo and Ruth Ikegah speak to us. We also had several GitHub workshops to celebrate HacktoberFest and teach the students in the various Study Groups about Git and GitHub.

Moving on, we also had a Cloud Session in collaboration with DSC Bayero, Kano with Bakare Emmanuel, and Abba Jibril as speakers.

Due to the overwhelmingly positive response from the community, we decided to organize a 5-day event called “A Deep Insight into Tech”, an event where we talked about tech. The speakers at the event were people with rich knowledge in their respective fields. Talks on Frontend, Backend, Cyber Security, Game Development, Technical Writing, UI, Data Science, AI, and Mobile were covered. At the end of the event, we had many positive responses about the event and a huge turn up even with it being a lengthy event. We also hosted our Android Study Jam which was held for a duration of 6 weeks.

To wrap up the events for the year, we hosted a Project Management Workshop for Project managers. We had Chidi Okoye speak about Project Management. We also started our podcast this year and created a sub-team in the College of Medicine (CMUL).

Among our listed achievements, we had several collaborations with other tech communities for Hackathons and community services. As a community, we are grateful for all we could achieve thanks to the support of everyone who made this year successful for us, from the core team to the tutors to the individuals who took it upon themselves to make DSC Unilag exceptional. Even though we couldn’t do all we outlined for the year, we are glad to have made an impact and helped plenty of people.

With a community of over 1,500 members, we are glad to have moved 50% of our members to the new platform designed for the community in the past 4 months. We hope and will continue to raise the bars of the community high while also impacting and helping developers in our community and beyond in the year to come.

All our events of the new tenure were recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. It won’t take but a minute to check our social media, do well to follow and subscribe. We’re on the following social media platforms:

Instagram — dscunilag.dev/instagram

Twitter — dscunilag.dev/twitter

Linkedin — dscunilag.dev/linkedin

YouTube — dscunilag.dev/youtube

Slack — dscunilag.dev/slack

Website — dscunilag.dev

We’re open to people joining our community. Join us at the Developer Student Clubs University Of Lagos, we can’t wait for you to join our awesome community.

We wish you a wonderful and prosperous year in advance!