Picture this: you attend a hackathon not to participate in it but to connect with someone you’d been teleconferencing with before then. They have briefly stepped out but ay, you decide to accept the offer to munch some snacks while you wait. While going through introductions, the moment I say I am a Software Engineer, everything changes…
Well, that’s exactly what happened in Lagos, Nigeria on 11th March 2017. I was attending the DBootcamp and the person to meet was also visiting from Kenya, Lilian Nduati, she’s listed among the supporters on the speakers’ page. She’d stepped out and whatever that changed follows …
“I am a software engineer by profession” sounds too official doesn’t it? Evangeline de Bourgoing, also listed among the supporters directs me to one of the teams participating and introduces me as the one they have been waiting for. Not exactly! The team lacked an executor of their idea. They wanted to present a prototype in less than two hours, the presentation time.
Often are the times when you find yourself saying “I’ve got to do something”. This is one of them for me. So I sat down, listened to what they were planning to achieve, the problem they were solving and did not think twice about how I would help them.
WordPress prides itself on running 28% of the internet.
The kicker for me is usually the simplicity plus extensibility of the admin dashboard allowing several users with multiple rights. So it was ideally based on:
Quick setup – Based on the time constraint Easy content management – In case I left before we had added all content, I could leave them at it Thousands of themes – For Aesthetics’ sake I won’t bother you with the details of the project but our (I had now become part of the team) final presentation become this.
The social media accounts had been created before so we just linked them and a ‘cherry’ on top: we created a video showing the process of uploading the data.
Lilian did come back an hour later. I got introduced to the director of CodeforAfrica Justin Arenstein whom we had a quick discussion around the impact they are driving at partnering with d|Bootcamps.
And so I left. Off to another meet up, PyData Lagos first meetup.
Later the next day, I was sent some good news. The ORUData team came in as second place. I don’t take credit at all, but I am happy that WordPress came in to save the day as a prototyping tool.
@ORUDATAng presents ORUData, an app to alleviate the clean water crisis in Nigeria through civic engagement #editorslab
— Global Editors Network (@GENinnovate) March 11, 2017