Thread by @codebeast

A few months ago, I was frustrated at not being able to attend developer events because of visa challenges. Some really awesome engineers from Microsoft came up with an idea that can help build learning bridges for Africans #thread

Most of us can’t

1. Afford to go to international conferences...
2. and even when we can (or get sponsored), we are denied visas.

Since this is the case, @sarah_edo alongside a team of badass awesome developers decided to bring the conference to us.

Considering that Nigerian youths (which has the largest ecosystem) of developers in Africa are the most victims of Visa denials, we decided to start the first African International Conference in Lagos, Nigeria.

We named the conference CONCATENATE (branded as: concatenate - @ConcatenateConf).

Since there are factors like cultural diversity, distance (speakers outside Africa) and this is first of its kind, we decided to start lightly — then scale.

We were willing to invest in having as many developers as available to attend and as many great speakers available to speak. The only way we could do this without going broke was to start with a remote conference.

Remote implies that some speakers outside Africa are allowed to speak from their offices/homes while they are projected on different large screens and they can also interact with the audience.

On the other hand, some speakers will speak physically at the event venue.

This way, we can have everyone (speakers and attendees) participate on a small scale budget. From v2 of the event, we intend to have speakers outside Africa be physically present.

Hopefully, we would have sponsors to help us scale.

The first event is scheduled to happen on August 10th and 11th. 2 days, 23 speakers from around the world, 1000 stickers, Free @abookapart books, @eggheadio, @scotch_io School, @codesandboxapp and @FrontendMasters Subscriptions, the list goes on.

The awesome speakers include:

1. @TheLarkInn
2. @lauragift21
3. @iChuloo
4. @JemYoung
5. @estellevw
6. @MinaMarkham
7. @adactio
8. @sxywu
9. @YellzHeard
10. @shortdiv

Relax that's not all:

11. @ireaderinokun
12. @wesbos
13. @burkeholland
14. @zachleat
15. @teleject
16. @simona_cotin
17. @grigs
18. @colinbendell
19. @EliFitch
20. @AaronGustafson
21. @holtbt
22. @sarah_edo
23. @codebeast

Awesome @unicodeveloper is the event's MC.

The event is organized by @sarah_edo, @holtbt, and @codebeast (me) with a lot of help from developers around the world. We currently have huge support from companies like @microsoft, @cloudinary, @mozilla, @zonetechpark, etc

Visit concatenate.io to learn more. Registration is officially open and thanks to @cloudinary, you can make your conference tags right from the website's registration page: concatenate.io/register.

@ozoemena_nonso wrote a great post about the background and details of the event on @Real_CSS_Tricks. You can get all the info you need from his fantastic post: css-tricks.com/remote-confere…