#focus100

[syazwanxv]

congratulations brother! 🤗 #dulangboys #driverpengantin #focus100% 😂😂😂

[shopzuvaa]

Kelechi, founder of Zuvaa showing her love for African Prints at #FOCUS100! #africanfashion

[chescaleigh]

Woooa it's a wall of Chesca at #FOCUS100 #sorrynotsorry thanks to everyone who tweeted & contributed to the conversation! I'm so blessed to have the opportunity to use social media to educate & entertain. Even with the tough days and tough subjects, I love love love my job. Don't ever forget how powerful your online voice is. What will you use yours for? #social4change

[chescaleigh]

FOCUS100 is one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year. This October 3RD-4th in New York City, digitalundivided brings together top tech companies founded/co-founded by black women, innovative companies like Facebook, Google, AMEX and Microsoft, top investors from firms like Andreesen Horowitz, Gen Y Capital, Techstars, keynote speakers like MC Hammer, Stacy Brown Philpot (Taskrabbit) and more for the most diverse tech conference on the planet. Over 80% of FOCUS100 speakers are women and/or people of color.

I'm speaking at FOCUS 100 here in NYC, this Friday 10/3 alongside Issa Rae and keynote speaker Omar Epps! Will I see you there?

[blackfemalecoders]

Hackathons are Pretty Great.

Source: google images

I’ve been meaning to write about my awesome experience at my most recent Hackathon for awhile but alas, time has that funny way of eluding you.  Well, as promised, here it is.  I’ll start with this simple but truthful statement:

Hackathons are pretty great.

Hackathons are a great way to get together with other developers and practice the art of building entire projects on the fly.   I witnessed this once again when I had the opportunity to go to the Global Mobile Hackathon for the FOCUS100 conference a few weeks ago.  Hackathons are usually 24+ hour events where developers spend the entire time focused on building [ideally functioning] products of their choosing and competing for prizes.  This one was no different, although my live-blogging responsibilities as part of the social media team for the conference prevented me from being able to participate.  Not participating ended up working in my favor as it gave me the chance to roam the room and chat with multiple individuals and teams working on interesting projects of varying domains.  The theme of the event was exploring mobile apps in a global context and, as a result, the project ideas ranged pretty widely.  One group worked on a recipe app that would accompany ingredients with their respective nutritional information for Nigerian recipes whose nutritional value was often more difficult to measure.  Another group built an app that used geo-location APIs to locate the nearest health food options available based on your current location.  I met an awesome newbie BlackFemaleCoder named Natasha who spent her time at the hackathon learning JSON and interacting with social media APIs. Having come from a background in teaching, Natasha was new to programming and was a few weeks into a coding bootcamp program that was teaching her the basics.  I found speaking with her to be incredibly interesting and inspiring as she spoke on her pursuit of an eventual startup as her motivation for learning how to code.  Her desire to be self-sufficient in both the technical and business realm echoed similar advice I provided during my tweetchat a couple weeks ago with Digital UnDivided on black women getting into coding.

During my conversation with Natasha at the Hackathon, she conveyed her commitment to pushing through the process of learning to code while also admitting to its difficulty.  We spoke on how it required understanding the balance between independent learning and knowing when to ask for help.  As to what motivated her to keep going as a programmer, she said the following which I thought was really inspiring:

[Before] I was a perpetual student but I reached this field and realized I didn’t want to do that anymore.

After that delightful conversation with Natasha, I engaged in a series of other awesome techy conversations that made my day.  I found myself in the midst of a spirited philosophical debate that started off with the ethics of proprietary versus open-source software and eventually moved to the benefits of UNIX versus Windows.  Through that discussion, I met another awesome BlackFemaleCoder named Tara from Microsoft and a Linux-kernel and Free and Open Source (FOSS) evangelist named Patrick.  It turned out Patrick was part of the team that wrote a piece of software called Rabid Neurosis back in the 90s which was a predecessor to Napster.  After mentioning his involvement with Rabid Neurosis and the deep controversy that surrounded the software at the time, he discussed how that experience led him to being more committed to supporting free-and-open-source software.  I think it's awesome who you end up bumping into at these kinds of events.

All in all, I was super glad to have had the chance to attend this Hackathon.  If you ever have the opportunity to attend the FOCUS100 Hackathon, or any other hackathons in general, I highly encourage you to do so!  Even if you’re not programming, you end up learning so much and meeting a ton of really inspiring people.  Definitely an event not worth missing.

As an aside, thanks to those who responded to the last Coding Project post!  I will definitely be posting about my projects as I continue my journey through Hacker School so keep a look out!

[khaliabraswell]

How I won my first hackathon!

On Thursday, October 3rd, (my birthday eve/Scandal Day) I flew to New York, NY to celebrate my birthday by exploring the city and attending the Digital Undivided Global Mobile Hackathon at the FOCUS 100 conference!  I became familiar with Digital Undivided sometime last year when I found out about the inaugural FOCUS 100 conference which targeted African-American Women Entrepreneurs. Knowing I was unable to attend, I told myself that I would try to attend the next one. Once the advertising began for this year, I began plotting to attend. Once I found out there would be a hackathon, I asked my high school friend who now lives in Brooklyn could I stay with her and the rest is history!

But wait, what in the world is a hackathon?  A hackathon is an event that brings individuals from all backgrounds together in order to solve a problem using technology. In no way are we traditionally hacking into anything and breaking the law. Instead, we are using technology for good and developing a new approach to improving society. (FYI, the word 'hack' is a new buzz word to describe anything involving an untraditional approach to doing something). Although there are many models to how hackathons are ran, most of them are 24 hours of straight coding. Sponsors provide plenty of food, snacks, energy drinks, and soda to help keep participants awake and mentors are usually on hand to help participants once they get stuck. 

I had been afraid of hackathons before my Silicon Valley internship; however, after witnessing the greatness that came out of the CODE2040 Hack4Diversity hackathon, I realized that this fear was pointless since hackathons are for amateur's and pros! (Plus you learn a lot while you're there).

The #FOCUS100 Global Mobile Hackathon The #FOCUS100 Global Mobile Hackathon (GMC) was an overnight hackathon dedicated to creating innovative ways to increase access to data/information on mobile platforms in urban communities around the world. Prizes included a Nexus 7 tablet from Google which included $200 gift cards for Google Play and a bunch of Google schwag for the top winners, $500 cash (to split) for the best hack, Rasberry Pi's for the team with the most hackathon newbies, and an AWS gift card for the most entertaining pitch. 

My Experience It wasn't until I arrived in NYC that I realized my friend France Jackson from Clemson University would be in attendance. Since I came alone, she invited me to join her team which included PhD student Aqueasha Martin and post doc Wanda Eugene, PhD. We began by throwing out random ideas we thought could be useful in undeserving communities. Our initial list contained about four different ideas; however, there was one that made everyone that stopped by our brainstorming session excited. It was our idea for an app that would suggest a healthy alternative ingredient to your food recipes. Our thought process was that people just do not know what's 'healthy'. For instance, we're told to eat salads; however, even though iceberg lettuce is used most often, it is the least nutritious lettuce to eat. We wanted a gamification aspect so we decided to add a leader board for users who contribute healthy recipes to our database. They would be ranked by other users by the best recipe that uses healthy ingredients.     We had a lot of ideas for our app, but due to some constraints, we had to alter them a lot. We had to determine what 'healthy' meant in order to develop our alternative criteria. We decided to go with calories and just create a script to compare the amount of calories of an item and suggest a different item with lower calories. We searched, and searched, and searched some more for an API to give us the information we wanted for ingredients, but the only one that gave us the information required developers to wait 24hours for an API key - bummer. We ended up hardcoding our app to make it show what we wanted for the sake of our final presentation. This was unfortunate because I really wanted to learn how to take information from an API and create code to make it do what I want. I'm one step closer though so it wasn't a total lost.  Gratefully, we had mentors Scott Hanselman (Microsoft), Tara Walker (Microsoft), and Adria Richardson (Technology Evangelist), on hand to help with any problems that arrived. I promise I have never learned so much so fast from a group of individuals. It was so awesome! They were all so willing to explain concepts and provide solutions to help us with our app. The beautiful thing is that they agreed to keep in touch and help support us in the future! We came to a stopping point some time after 4am when we decided that we had all we needed for our final demo. After about four hours of sleep, we woke up, put finishing touches on the app, and prepared for our final pitch. Although we received great feedback, I had no idea we would win in practically every category! Not only were we all females, but we were hackathon newbies! And as a result of our win, we were featured in the articled on BLACKENTERPRISE.COM (I'm still excited) which highlighted the conference. What a way to begin hacking!  Hackathon Lessons Learned I will save this for another post since this post is rather lengthy. I will say that I plan to attend every FOCUS 100 symposium and maybe even the bootcamp as long as my calendar allows me to travel. This conference had educators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and industry experts all in one place to discuss issues and highlights of the minority tech community. From the very inspiring talk by MC Hammer to the varying panels, FOCUS 100 was truly an empowering experience.  Sidenote…. It was great to see my Kapor Center family in attendance! Although I missed Mitch & Freada, it was awesome to see Ulili, Brian, Ana, and Andrea who was also a 2013 Kapor Center Fellow. It was also great to see Amy from CODE 2040 and Perry who was a 2013 CODE 2040 fellow. I never thought I would see people I met in California again so soon; however, I am so glad I did! :)  Stay tuned for my next blog which will include Hackathon lessons learned! 

Pictured in bottom corner: Brian Dixon, Dr.Wanda Eugene, Myself, France Jakcson, Rachel Spivey, Aqueasha Martin, Scott Joseph 

[blackfemalecoders]

Africa as a Global Leader in the Tech Scene

This past Saturday, for the first time ever, I live-blogged.  I attended Digital UnDivided's FOCUS100 Conference and listened to several great panels discussing topics like how to develop tech talent and how to start a tech company, all the while typing and tweeting as fast as my fingers could move in order to capture all of the interesting tidbits I was hearing.  Normally I probably would have found myself gravitating more towards participating in the Global Mobile Hackathon put on concurrently by the conference so live-blogging the panels was a brand new and eye-opening experience for me.  I learned about the many exciting movements happening in tech around the world, specifically in Africa (though, of course, I couldn't help myself and ended up spending a chunk of the day hanging out at the hackathon to see what people were up to and debate Linux vs. Windows, but that'll be discussed in a follow-up post).

As we've seen recently, tech is booming in Africa.  From our fellow BlackFemaleCoder Martha developing her own version of Hacker School in Nairobi to a Ugandan software dev team placing in app competitions to the first African designed smartphone, there's been a lot going on.  This boom was expounded upon at the FOCUS100 conference during a panel entitled "3 Great Tech Companies Redefining the African Continent."   The panel featured Blessings Oyeleye, Rebeca Enonchong and Nneka Obiudu as speakers and Stacey Morrison from BlogHer as the moderator.  Oyeleye, a chemical engineer turned fashionista, runs a company called Makers Crew, which focuses on delivering high fashion to Nigerian women; Enonchong is the founder of AppsTech, which is a global provider of software solutions and also an Oracle Platinum Partner; and Obiudu founded Africa.com with the goal of dismantling the myth of Africa being a monolithic, under-developed society.  These women spoke on the incredible potential the continent has already displayed and how it is in fact leading the way in mobile app development.  What I found most interesting from the discussion was learning that desktops had never been a primary platform.  Instead, many use their phones as their primary means of connecting to the world around them.  Mobile banking has exploded and people use their phones to pay for nearly everything, including taxi cabs and college fees.  Imagine being able to pay your semester tuition on your phone!  That's awesome (or maybe not so awesome, seeing how expensive college is these days...).

The speakers also mentioned that over 62% of the population of the entire continent is under 25 years old, implying that the majority of the continent is thus incredibly tech literate.  They argued that this is a huge opportunity to reach an under-served and often underestimated market and that, often times, the reason American tech companies fail when trying to establish themselves in the region is that they attempt to apply an American business model in Africa instead of adapting.  The speakers also mentioned that non-Africans still tend to think of Africa as a "country" rather than a continent, which also leads to a complete misunderstanding of the diverse and ever-increasingly dynamic market.

All in all, it was an incredibly interesting discussion.  I found both the work and the words of these women inspiring.  There's much to look forward to in regards to how Africa will continue making its mark in the tech scene and these women have made that future sound even more exciting.

For more information on the FOCUS100 conference, check out some highlights here.