March 24th-26th, 2022, brought together, again, the largest gathering of open-source stakeholders — contributors, creators, experts, enthusiasts, etc. — from across Africa.
OSCAFEST is an annual technical gathering for Africans in open-source. The first edition took place in 2020, recording the attendance of over 1000 people from 5+ African countries. Like every developer event, OSCAFEST is usually marked by multiple learning activities, including keynote sessions from renowned technical speakers.
This year’s edition ran as a hybrid event with ninety-six (96) sessions and ninety-two (92) speakers. With an attendance of over 1400 participants from multiple countries, alongside multiple community feedback here, we can confidently say that the event was a success.
Here’s a summary of how OSCAFEST 2022 went.
Day 1 [Thursday, March 24, 2022]
The festival kicked off with the registration session, after which we launched into a series of workshops. The workshops ran in different halls simultaneously to enable people to participate in workshops they were more interested in.
Workshops
We had an Application Engineer from Sourcegraph, Michael Bali, discuss the importance of Sourcegraph, which he referred to as a must-have developer tool for open source.
Precious Ndubueze taught about the concepts of developer tools, how they help the tech community, and how to build and contribute to these tools in his talk, Building and Contributing to Open Sourced Developer Tools.
Obinna Odirionye taught the attendees extensively about Rethinking Serverless Containers.
We learnt about how to go from writing code to building relevant experience for the workspace that takes you from the small jobs to the big leagues during the talk by Emmanuel Bakare titled “Becoming a Smarter Engineer and not a Better One”.
Tapas Adhikary spoke about the path to technical writing and how to make money from it in his talk, Technical Writing Made Easy.
Christine Abernathy spoke about the different ways to function in the Open Source space, regardless of your skill, in her talk tagged “The Many Sides of an Open Source Career.
Ever thought of being able to talk with Siri or Alexa in Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa language? Chris Emezue is fascinated by the idea, so he held an interesting session titled “NaijaVoice: Curation of speech-text corpora for Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba languages”.
We wrapped up day 1 with another of Chris Emezue’s session on Lanfrica as a Participatory Approach to Documenting Machine Translation Research on African Languages.
Sustain Africa [Thursday, March 24, 2022]
Sustain Africa Summit was also held on the same day at a different location. Sustain Africa is an invite-only event focused on creating more sustainability in open source, this time focused on the African OSS ecosystem. Read Sustain Africa 2022 event summary here.
Day 2 [Friday, March 25, 2022]
The amazing duo, Adaora Nwodo, and Karen Amari were the hosts for day 2 of the conference. It was no less engaging and interesting than day 1, as there was an interesting lineup of workshops and talks on different fields, including open-source internships, growing in open source, mobile development, graphics design, product management, payment structures, web3, and many more. We also listened to keynote speeches from Odunayo Eweniyi, Stephan Thomas, and other incredible speakers. View all speakers and sessions for OSCAFEST 2022 here.
Day 3 [Saturday, March 26, 2022]
You know what they say about the end of a thing being the best part, right? Festival Day 3 was a mix of different awesome things: great talks and keynote speeches, good food, bonding and interaction, pictures, and many more.
We listened to different speakers shed light on technical writing, Google Season of Docs, designing for kids, thriving in open-source, etc. Ada Nduka Oyom and Samson Goddy, in the OSCA Keynote Speech, highlighted the milestones OSCA had reached so far, the target, and the plans to expand the community. They explained extensively what OSCA stands for and the practical steps that have been and will be taken to reach the end goal.
OSCA and the She Code Africa (SCA) community have a long-standing partnership aimed at ensuring diversity among participants. They do this by providing 100% discounted tickets to SCA community members.
We're also grateful to our community partner TalentQL who provided us with their beautiful office space for the event. TalentQL is building world-class engineering teams with vetted software developers. They also offer engineering and product certification training via AltSchoolAfrica.
Event Feedback
Tales of great networking, diversity, inspired careers, beautiful swags, etc., were part of the feedback we got from attendees, speakers, and sponsors via the official hashtag, #OSCAFEST22. View some of them from Olamide Aboyeji, Anjana Vakil, and Stephen Tony.
To see images and video highlights of this year’s festival and stay updated with news from OSCA, you can check out the event gallery and our YouTube channel.
Special Thanks
None of these would have been a reality without the immense efforts of our incredible core team, organising team, the plethora of sponsors and amazing event volunteers. Special thanks to the sponsors for contributing to the success of the event.
What’s Next?
In the next year, we plan to continue our goal of reaching as many people as we can with the gospel of open source, providing them with a headstart needed to launch a successful career in the field, while also providing more community programs and initiatives within open source to our community members.
Indeed, the future is open.
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Written by Ada Nduka Oyom on behalf of the OSCAFEST 2022 organising team.
