500NigeriaDevs4Eth Kernel Week 1 Update
Getting set to create Africa’s access to a new web
Kernel Fellowship has been an amazing journey and we are excited to bring you updates!
A look into who are
500NigeriaDevs4Eth, was born in October 2019, as an offshoot of the OneMillionDevs initiative specifically for Nigeria and Africa. Running since October, the project was designed primarily to onboard web2 developers into the web3 ecosystem.
Over the nine months, we have effectively introduced two hundred and seventy nine (279) persons to web3 and we are proud of having thirty four (34) students who are presently contributing to open source, working as interns or team members to various projects.
The program has attracted web2 developers from Nigeria, Kenya, and a number from India since we started the program, and to better improve on the program and accommodate all Africans, we are renaming and rebranding the program in the coming days.
Our Mission
Our mission is to identify web3 passions, train them in a collaborative and supportive remote environment and create an African web3 community.
Our Reason for taking this Journey
As web3 keeps growing and the demand for awareness increases, we believe that the drive for awareness and adoption in Africa will happen when we have many blockchain solutions domesticated and very relatable to the African experience and building quality African developers to oversee and bring these solutions to reality is a good start in achieving this goal.
Below is an illustration of our inspiration
Back to Kernel!
From the first week at kernel, we have had very wonderful comments about what we are working on and we are collaborating with others to work on advancing knowledge in the web3 space. Many thanks to Katongole Allan, a fellow at Kernel and a senior developer from Uganda, who agreed to join us to better build this ecosystem together. We have also had very outstanding support from the Kernel team Andy, Vivek, Sachin and enjoyed the mentors who were available for week 1.
For the remaining weeks at Kernel we will be collaborating with as many teams, individuals and groups that are contributing to the growth of the ecosystem. However detailing our week 1 collaboration, we are collaborating with the following teams as we believe our goals (short term and long term) are interwoven and will grow the ecosystem;
Dao.care, a platform where you deposit your idle DAI and interest on your DAI is used in supporting community projects
Porium, a distributed online learning platform built as a pipeline for creating more web 3 developers, collaborators and funders around the globe.
Rare Birds, a community for the developing world entrepreneurial ecosystem. Connecting diaspora investors with startups in their home countries so together they can build great companies.
Lessons from Week One
Building for fun, there are many reasons why people take up building projects, however building for fun makes building fun.
Building for & with users, while building a project/product, there is a need to understand if the product is built because the product owner needs it or users actually needs it and in the process of building users should be carried along every step of the way (User research and continuous user feedback)
Do small things, Building solutions does not necessarily mean building castles and estates, look out for the tiny things and build
Create a space, for every community, event and spaces there is always that addition that makes it more lively, welcoming and interesting and this for us is a personal lesson that will reflect going forward from our program structure!
Airmeet provides a very amazing conference experience with their tables. We just don’t get coffee or snacks while conversing.
Ask
We are looking for more mentors especially frontend
Time with mentors to help us better shape the project (we want global standard and will give it all it takes)
Build network with projects and team to help absorb our students as interns or junior junior devs so they can further learn
Funding!!!!!!!!!!! Education really needs funding and we will be open to discuss what we need the funds for, how we intend to use it
Conclusively, we are looking to meet all the mentors at Kernel to share from their wealth of experience and if possible get to chat with all the 200+ fellows, who knows outside of work we might learn new language, culture, recipe (yes we cook) and new things.
Since we are going to be doing these updates weekly, book a seat and subscribe to ensure you get to be the first to read from us next week!
Say hello https://twitter.com/ebunayo08