DSC Unilag 2019 Year-In-Review
The past year in Developer Student Club Unilag has been a year of exponential growth thanks to the support of the school management and our industry partners.
We started the year with programming classes which we hosted in conjunction with University of Lagos Science Student Association and National Association of Computer Science Students for 4 weeks for algorithm, front, back and mobile tracks
We also hosted a Cloud Study Jam and HashCode 2019. We also hosted Open Hack Week in colloboration with Interswitch, Cloudinary, CITS Unilag, Lepsta, Whogohost, NACOSS and SWIFT Networks.
On the 6th of August, Akinjobi Sodiq was announced as the new lead for the the club.
After that, we had the first event — a meet and greet (Info Session) with both new and existing members of the club on the 31st of August, 2019. We had about 100 students in attendance on that day.
Thereafter, we hosted, 5 weeks of Introductory Classes in the following tracks: Web development, Python, and UI/UX.
We also built our own Blog! The team that developed it was headed by @Prof T. and it’s named ThunderBolt. It is open-source and other DSCs can use it as a template — https://github.com/DSC-Unilag/DSC-Blog. It’s still buggy but a final version should be out in a week or two.
We hosted the Flutterwave Student Hackathon at the University of Lagos. We had several teams for the hackathon and there were 3 final winners.
During Hacktoberfest, we hosted our very own Hacktoberfest Unilag on the 11th of October, 2019. There, we introduced students to open source and how to contribute to open source projects using Github.
During our holiday from the 5th to the 8th of November, we had a one-week boot camp. On the 5th, we had an Introduction to the DSC seminar where we talked about the boot camp and we hosted a Food Fest which was our end of the session get-together.
From the 6th to the 8th of November, we had series of classes where we taught:
- Explore ML Workshop: Introduced students to Machine Learning using content from the Explore ML team at Google which held for 2 days.
- Cloud Study Jam: We hosted our cloud study jam on the 7th of November.
- Content Writing Workshop: Introduced students to technical content writing and documentation. This was a one day workshop by @EshoKemi
- UI/UX Workshop: We hosted a 3-day workshop to build on what was taught during the semester classes.
- Backend with Node JS Workshop: We hosted a 3-day workshop on the concept of Node Js.
- Backend with Python (Django) Workshop: We hosted a 3-day workshop on the concept of the Django framework.
- Frontend Workshop: We hosted a 3-day workshop on the concept of HTML and CSS.
Also, we attended the Tensorflow Roadshow on the 9th of October. See pictures.
During the month of November, we attended DevFests Lagos, Ajah, and Ibadan. Our lead gave a keynote at DevFest Ilorin and our mentor, Oluwalolope Hope spoke at DevFest Ibadan.
As a community, we gave back to the community by teaching two secondary schools from the 9th to the 13th of December by taking them on Introduction to Web Development with HTML and CSS. We taught International School, University of Lagos, and Queens College, Yaba.
We also had challenges during the holiday like #30DaysOfCode on slack and #ChristmasChallenge. Below are some of our member works:
https://michael-eugene.github.io/World-Clock-App/, https://royayo.github.io/project2/, https://emmanuerl.github.io/timezone/, https://omolajacodec.github.io/ChristmasTree-DSC/, https://adavizethefirst.github.io/, https://harithmetic1.github.io/christmas-tree/, https://danyomo.github.io/chrismastree/, https://github.com/adewolejosh/christmas-tree-design/blob/master/Dec%2025
We also had a Webinar where we hosted Timothy Olaleke (@timtech4u) on the topic “Taking advantage of Google Summer of Code” where he gave tips on how to participate in the Google Summer of Code.
Some of our members also built amazing stuff! Some of them are:
A countdown clock — https://codepen.io/rabbatulbait/full/KKwmJrx
An anonymous messenger app
CHALLENGES
With all our achievements, we also faced several challenges.
The first challenge was picking the right members for the organizing team. In the end, we are the best team in the world!
One major challenge was increasing female participation. We noticed a lot of males and just a few females and we worked on how to increase the participation of females by consciously allowing ladies take lead in our events.
We had challenges with participation from other faculties. Most of our members were from the Science and Engineering Faculties. So we took one of our introductory classes to another faculty other than Science or Engineering and the turn up was great! We also included students from other faculties in our core team for easy access to the other faculties.
We had issues with participation in projects this year but with proper advice and ideas, we were able to tackle this challenge to a bit.
We hope and know we would build a bigger and better DSC Unilag this year!
REVIEWS
DSC UNILAG was definitely one of the best features of 2019 for me. Keeping the balance between being a student and being developer became easier, improving my skills became very possible due to the events like hacktoberfest ,study jams and weekly classes, not to talk of the boot camp that came during the end of section break which really gave me life as a developer a major boost. Plus there’s this air of relief when you remember there’s an entire community of developers where you can always go to for advice at any point in time and you’ll still get positive results. Special thanks to the organizers of DSC
DSC has actually helped me from the first day I joined, I remember I started learning JS then, on my first day I asked a question with which I got replies and encouragements. Since then I’ve got lot of help and opportunities, I participated in the open hack week, that was the first event I’ll ever participate in since I started my journey into tech. Through DSC I’ve met great minds, I’ve got mentors and the energy and willingness to help from other members is amazing. This is a community I’ll never regret joining, there’s nothing to loose here but much to gain.
Dsc UNILAG has been a very great help to me as regards software development and relationships.. I’ve been able to attend events that were as a result of being a member of dsc UNILAG.. in the past 1 year that I’ve been a member, I’ve also met amazing developers and made friends with them.. people like Ekene Ashinze, Bakare, Abisola, Nifemi, Sodiq, Hope.. to mention a few. It’s really been an awesome ride.. and I can confidently say dsc UNILAG had been worth it so far!
ChukwuTosin
Fast forward in time… .Due to movements I didn’t get to study computer science as I had wished so I studied in the art, so for four years plus I waited…I waited to start the journey, June 2019 saw me start with a one month boot camp coding program. it was a crash full-stack web base boot camp I knew I always had the flair so after that one month it became stronger. I just knew this is what I ought to be doing, this is what I wanted to do. Omo I tried to join different groups, i attended some meetups I was privileged to know of, I joined the Andela Learning community (ALC) on the GCE track and I met Don in one of the meet-ups, he ended up being a compass for my journey. I also met LordGhostX who was pivotal in me joining @DSC at Unilag. I mean the story is long, as I joined DSC started from scratch, looking for something that will expose me to real life projects. I did quite some projects at DSC, I attended my first hackathon too, I learned how to use Figma for UI designs I met fantastic people too, Geektutor, Ifihan, The Willy, to mention but a few. DSC open me up to diverse opportunities from data mining with Algostacks to building web sites. The number of tech events Ihave been Privileged to attend on account of DSC are uncountable from Devfests, Flutter, hackerthons etc. DSC is a place to be for any one starting off their tech careers.
Thank you to Aniedi Udo-Obong, Auwal MS, @vodumuyiwa, our valuables mentors(special shoutout to Bakman and Ashinze) and everyone who supported us and ensured we had a great year. Shout out to our team of heroes — @ifihan_, @Prof T., @mba_oma, @olamideaboyeji, Willy the designer, Irene Chan, @Abdullahi, Oseyemi and the numerous volunteers that give back to the community.
Here’s a toast to a better 2020.