This project will entail working with
innovation/technology hubs in Kenya under the auspices of Strathmore University
on an initiative to mentor young
developers in next generation application development to port.
This will be a
training engagement combined with some entrepreneurship training to develop a
community around Bluemix platform. At the end of the training developers or teams that managed to develop most appealing and usable apps with
Bluemix will be selected to become Bluemix ambassadors. These ambassadors could further promote Bluemix with
organizing meet-ups for other developers in their community where they could
build or integrate apps using Bluemix.
Pictured: Hoong Sheng, Muriuki Mureithi (Digital Opportunity Trust), Maria Kacerikova, Dr. Joseph Sevilla (iLabAfrica) and Dominic O'Toole
Summary of Week 1
The participants started off the week knowing very little about developing applications in the Cloud, Scrum, Agile or Big Data. Over the course of 5 days we covered may topics and by Friday, each team was having a stand up scrum, brainstorming ideas with the final highlight: streaming a twitter feed and posting to that twitter feed from a web browser. Well done to the team and all the participants.
NodeJs, Express, ElasticMQ, Twitter API, Big Data, IBM Data Cache, MySQL, DevOps, Git
Team working, Scrum, Agile, Personas, Invention Vs Innovation
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12th May 2014, Monday
Day 1 of the workshop, with the great support from Strathmore University, we conducted our opening session at Strathmore University's auditorium. Registration began at 0830h and participants across Kenya started streaming into Auditorium.
First up was IBM expert, Ben Mann, who gave an introduction to applications development on Cloud and an overview of the entire workshop. To break the ice between the participants, Maria, got participants to set their personal expectations for this two week of workshop and share among the participants.
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| Ben Mann Introducing Application Development on Cloud |
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| Maria engaging participants on their expectations |
For developers, the real action only happens when their hands are on the command line. The objective of day one was to have the participants experience creating cloud based applications. The sample Node Web Starter application was used as a starting point, and the lab exercise involved translating the entire UI into Swahili and deploying to the Cloud
With 2 labs in action, Dominic and Ben took charge of one each and assisted with any queries the participants may have had.
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| Dominic in Oracle Lab |
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| Ben Mann in Ericsson Lab |
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13th May 2014, Tuesday
Day 2 began with the next exciting topic, Big Data. Our local Kenya Big Data expert, Paul Mutau, presented his experience and was introduced to a class of enthusiastic participants.
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| Participants taking part in question and answer session |
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| Ben Smith explaining different roles of a development project |
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| Ben Smith assisting a participant |
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14th May 2014, Wednesday
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| HS and Maria facilitating participants to form teams |
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| Participants discussing various roles in their teams |
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| Various teams brainstorming (2/3) |
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| Various teams brainstorming (3/3) |
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| Teams sharing the results of their brainstorming |
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15th May 2014, Thursday
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| Participants trying out lab exercises conducted on Big Data |
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| Maria sharing different ways in conducting a meeting |
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| Ben Smith assisting a participant |
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| Ben Smith conducting the hands on BlueMix workshop |
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| Students working helping one another in the lab exercises |
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16th May 2014, Friday
The day kicked off with the Elastic MQ demo from Ben Mann. Ben Smith prepared an excellent lab on using the Twitter API allowing the participants to learn how to pull and push. Sherif Ali became scrum master for the day and ran scrums for all teams.The teams concluded their project work for the week by adding their project information to DevOps.
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19th May 2014, Monday
IBMs top Mobile SDK developers ( Matt Perrins and Andrew Huffman ) rolled into town over the weekend to deliver this weeks hands on Mobile sessions. The day started with and introduction to Mobile application development in the Cloud and the different aspects of the underlying architecture that a developer must think of.
Andrew also delivered his Javascript 101 workshop as the sessions will be based on Node. He showed the team the different aspects of Java script and more importantly what pitfalls to avoid.
Andrew also delivered his Javascript 101 workshop as the sessions will be based on Node. He showed the team the different aspects of Java script and more importantly what pitfalls to avoid.
Eyes lit up when the possibilities of Hybrid mobile applications were discussed and the team decided to take the workshop in that direction. The afternoon was taken up by machine configuration, which proved a challenge for the team , mainly for the developers who were working from their own laptops.
Talking to the developers afterwards, quite a few an now considering changing their current projects to use hybrid technologies
19th May 2014, Monday Evening Meetup Session
Meetup Session: Let's Get Hands-on with Big Data!
To better outreach the developers community who are not available to join us during this 2 weeks of intensive workshop in Kenya, we created two Meetup sessions in the evenings to gather these developers.
In the first session's Big Data meetup, we have experts from IBM Nigeria to share an overview of Big Data. The session covers how interesting to extract data from unstructured text and apply analytic on the data for useful information.
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| Ben Mann and Big Data experts from Kenya and Nigeria |
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| Meetup session is hosted and recorded at Strathmore University |
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| Ben Mann engaging participants feedback for future meetups |
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| Meetup session catered to developers who are not available in the day |
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20th May 2014, Tuesday
The mobile workshops continued with the final setup of the participants development environments. The highlight of the morning was the demonstration of the Bluemix hybrid mobile sample running on an android device. All done in under 3 hours. Now the participants are using the Android development kit, Ionic, Genymotion,Bower and Grunt. Matt then walked through the code behind the samples, sowing the seeds for the later discussions.20th May 2014, Tuesday
The aim of the afternoon session was to start transforming the ideas into working mobile devices, the key requirement was to integrate the mobile app with REST services and if possible combine multiple data sources. The teams worked together for an hour and and then presented their ideas to the whole group. It was great to see the teams starting to share tasks, one articulating the idea while the others were white boarding. Others had fully fleshed prototype UIs to present. One on one discussions then took place with Matt and Andrews to help the teams firm up their designs. Some cool applications are being developed and what was noticeable was the each app was being designed to resolve a real world problem. Solutions to problems rather than solutions looking for problems.
Evening time brought on the first Next Generation Application development meetup. An overview of Cloud, Bluemix and Mobile development in Clould were presented. The next session is already being planned.
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21st May 2014, Wed
Ben Mann's Internet of Things workshop kicked of this morning. Doughnut drumkit anyone:
this was great fun. Some others discovered that one on the students was a pretty good ( electrical ) conductor:
The afternoon sessions continued with the application development, the applications are now starting to take shape. The screen as being developed and the work divided between the front end and middleware. The fun will be tying it all together. Matt and Andrews are alternating between the groups to offer advice, coaching and provide sample code. The students are progressing very quickly.
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22nd May 2014, Thursday
Deadline day... 8 hours until the final presentations
The students are feeling the pressure now, but taking it in their stride. Presentations will begin at 6 pm this evening. The rest of the day will be spent pulling the various strands of the applications together. Matt and Andrew are working very closely with the teams helping them to finish their applications and get them running on their devices.
Stakeholder discussion
Last nights discussion was the highlight of our two week event here in Strathmore. We gathered together a distinguished panel of experts to discuss software development and innovation in Kenya. A good crowd attended in the auditorium building to hear an engaging discussion from the panel. The conversation could of continued all night, but we had to stop to give the students some time to present their applications to the audience. 
Each team did a short presentation of their application, describing the problem they were solving and their solution. Booths were setup at the back of the room to showcase the applications to the audience. The students did a great job of their presentations, whatever soft skill we think may be lacking in graduates, they were not missing here. Well done to everyone.
I think it's a testament to the quality of the work done by the students during this week, that the discussions and demos continued for another hour. The excitement and enthusiasm was ( and still is ) infectious. Questions were asked about forming companies and taking their products to the next stage. You just feel as this group are on the cusp of something great and wonderful, all the cogs are now whirring with the possibilities of the what they can do with this new technology. It's been a joy to watch.
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23rd May 2014, Friday
Codeathon......The challenge Use the Internet of Things to make Africa a safer place
No let up in the excitement. We will all sleep for a week after this is over. The team is now busy connecting devices to Bluemix via Node Red.
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