HactoberFest, NACOSS (National Association of Computer Science Students) Software Exhibition, and DSC Info Session post-event Recap
The events were my first event as a developer student clubs lead, basically, my core team and I planned to host the events in two different days separately.
The first event is DSC Info Session and NACCOSS software exhibition which was a collaboration between DSC team and NACOSS BUK chapter, which was initially planned to be hosted on Thursday 3rd October 2019, but there was a Public holiday for Nigerian’s Independent day which was held on 1st October 2019, this makes NACOSS reschedule their activities, and the exhibition was been postponed to Friday 4th October 2019.
The NACOSS software director and I were the ones responsible for organizing both the Exhibition and the info session, which also include the DSC core team members. Dealing with students or human being in general is not easy, because people have different mentality, just day before the exhibition we got another issue with the students that register to pitch their solutions during the exhibition and had to called them one after the other to confirmed where if they are ready for the pitch or not, I was very disappointed to find out that 6 out the 10 students that register to pitch are telling me that they mistakenly filled out the pitching form, one is telling me he will not be able to make it to the exhibition and I couldn’t reach two of the participants, therefore only one student is ready and prepared his slide to pitched. We got no option but to postpone the exhibition together with the info session since the purpose of combining the two was to rich more students.
Moreover, we already planned another event on the subsequent day that is 5th October 2019 which is HactoberFest, therefore now we need to host the three-events all at once, which requires more time and planning. The DSC team tried very hard to secure a comfortable venue and enough refreshment to accommodate and certify all the attendees.
The registration started as early as 9 am we have a lot of swags from Ingressive LLC, GitHub and HacktoberFest, the swags are shared with the attendees as they register.
We projected the agenda on the screen, I introduced the participants to Developer student clubs, our activities, our missions and what we were able to achieve so far.
Secondly, I introduced my core team to the participants, those are the people that volunteer to be part of the mission, we have done the introduction in an interesting way in which each team member will step forward and introduce him/herself by stating his name, department, tech stack and the area he/she will be assisting the club. that doesn’t take much time.
We closed this section with a keynote speech from the former lead of DSC stating the achievements, challenges, and opportunities that the club brought to it members.
To not make the event boring a short Quiz Game was being conducted using kahoot.it in which the top three scorers got amazing prizes.
The Software exhibition also didn’t take much time since there were only one student ready to pitch. the pitching was amazing, the student named Muhammad Abdul built an Alumni Management System, with very interesting UI, I will share his story later. He received an award directly from NACOSS president and a cash prize from the Software director.
The last section was the most interesting part of the event, Timothy Olaleke introduced the students to Git, Github, Opensource, and HacktoberFest.
“Open source is changing the world — one pull request at a time”.
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean and DEV. it is open to everyone in our global community. Hacktoberfest encourages more participation in the open-source community, which grows bigger every year. Complete the 2019 challenge and earn a limited-edition T-shirt.
We code several demos demonstrating how to create HacktoberFest account and how to participate in the challenge and most of the participants that came with their laptops were able to make one or more pull requests on that day. We take the final Kahoot and serve refreshments to the attendees.
The event was successful in so many ways, we were able successful resolve the problem we encountered with the other event and host the two events at the same time, the turnout was amazing even though there was low women turn out, but we are still receiving very good feedback from the attendees, and we are still working on a ways to make women feel more inclusive in our community.