What is For Loop.

For Loop is a series of community led developer conferences targeted at making Nigeria a focal point for technology activities in Africa. It started about a year ago as online meetups and is now growing to universities. ForLoop has attracted the attention of top speakers like Prosper Otemuyiwa, Abayomi Osamiluyi, and also top Technology organizations like Andela, Hotels.ng, Google and more.

About ForLoop Bells

ForLoop Bells University is the first of its kind for two reasons

1. It used a model of 1 facilitator and 4 supporting experts as opposed to the other events that used only 1 facilitator
2. It is the first ForLoop event to run in a university for the university students

We started the day with high hopes, the speakers came much earlier than the participants, so that gave us time to run around the school. Before I go on, let me explain how this will be going on. We would be running through the entire session one by one as we move along the way.

Introduction.

This is the event I have attended with the largest world class talent - student ratio. So I am pretty excited about how this will turn out. We have three community managers, a couple of android developers, a couple of backend developers, a UX person and three university alumni cum software engineers.

The session followed the world class software engineering cycle particularly, we did three sprints in one day with a backlog estimation session, test driven development, architecture and retrospectives. I learnt that the website would be hosted on heroku - which is great. The hall is half filled, I am running to support the backend session 😃

About the Product Management Session.

So people have been having fun coming up with user stories. Everyone wants to become a product owner one day, I guess that is the first step into entrepreneurship. But beyond the fun, we are also covering topics like figuring out what the simple good things and bad practices there are in writing user stories.

About the Backend Session

Today's session was quite different from all the others I have been in. It was the first one where we had a facilitator: Akinwande Adegbola and 4 supporting experts who were assisting noobs setup things like XAMPP and composer. It was also the first time when we had zero internet to work with so we had to be quite innovative to pull it off. Wande started off explaining the concepts of an API and how it connected to the entire app that was being built. Next we moved into building the different endpoints that made up the user stories. Once that was done, the entire app was shared on github - I already cloned it :) and we were ready for the combined session.

About the Android Session and UX session

I could not attend these two sessions but I can tell that the participants learnt a lot and became enthusiastic about beginning careers in technology

Wrap up Sessions

Next we had a session wth Babajide(Andela's community manager), and Aniedi(Google Developer Relations) and also Prosper(Auth0 Developer Relations). Finally closed with Q/A with Fatai - a machine learning engineer who schooled in and lectured at Bells University. And it was picture and groopie time