DEV Community

Pabi Forbes
Pabi Forbes

Posted on

GDG Johannesburg: IWD Women TechMakers

GDG Johannesburg hosted a meetup on the 4th of April to celebrate International Women's Day. I attended the event and it was nothing but amazing.

What is GDG Johannesburg?

GDG Johannesburg (Google Developer Group Johannesburg) is a local South African community for developers who have a keen interest in Google's developer technologies. It is organized by Rebecca Franks, Christoff Jacobs, Joshua Leibstein, Peter John Welcome, and Kurt Mbanje.

GDG Johannesburg runs meetups every first Wednesday of the month, and each event can have a variety of topics and speakers.

Women TechMakers Meetup

This meetup was aimed at women, so as you would guess, the speakers were women.
Here's what the line up looked like:

17:00 - Welcome Drinks and Snacks
17:30 - Intro to GDG & Women in Tech event welcome!
18:05 - Talk 1 (15 min) -What the hell is UX and Human Centred Design anyway? (Niki De Bruyn)
18:25 - Talk 2 (15 min) - Enhancing your app with Firebase (Mbalenhle Ndaba)
19:00 - Talk 3 (45 min) - Building an artificial John Lennon with Keras (Jade Abbott)
19:45 - End Drinks and Prizes

I thoroughly enjoyed each talk and I have learnt so much from the ladies. The firebase talk was a bonus for me as I wanted to start using it for my future android projects.

Prizes

I managed to win myself a discount voucher on any JetBrains product of my choice. I won the voucher due to the fact that I tweeted the most about the meetup.
At the end of the talks, we also had to fill in a survey, I also won a T-Shirt for that, but I was feeling generous and I decided to hand the T-Shirt to another lady in the audience that hadn't won one yet.

Overall, the meetup was fun and informative, also considering that it was my first time attending a meetup, ever!

Did I mention that there was pizza and cupcakes? Well, there was pizza and cupcakes.

https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/6rdh23kf2gawhtqytl4r.jpg
https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ampddwg4gn455qeefqtc.jpg
https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ktau3zlzhyiqhtk3u4xt.jpg

**GDG Johannesburg information extracted from https://www.meetup.com/GDGJohannesburg/

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
jess profile image
Jess Lee

I'm looking forward to attending the NY one in a couple of weeks!

Collapse
 
pabiforbes profile image
Pabi Forbes

Awesome. Let us know how it goes? :)