GDG COMMUNITY OUTREACH, MERU UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Posted By: Unknown On Wednesday, 26 October 2016
One of the things that our community pioneers cared so much about was sharing the GDG Love with everyone — reaching out to
anyone interested about Google technologies and bringing them together to share
ideas, to collaborate, and to learn. Members of our community are always eager
to offer support, experience, and mentorship to different communities.
On 8th October 2016, The Computer Society of
Kimathi led by Billy Rotich, Intel Student Partners led by Chris Barsolai,
Microsoft Student Partners led by Arthur Otieno, and Officials from Dedan
Kimathi University Incubation Centre, all members of our GDG Community
left for the Meru University of Technology with a mission.
The objectives for our outreach are listed as
follows:
- Increase awareness of the GDG
Community to the university developer community in Meru
- Brainstorm ways to engage both
communities in advancing the local tech ecosystem and Foster
collaboration.
- Identify synergy opportunities
between The Meru Community and GDG Kimathi University
- Have fun!
During the event, we had a single session
with 5 different speakers. We first had Kenneth Njihia from The DeHUB. He
talked about how their space helps to incubate research innovations. He also explained how vibrant communities such as GDG
Kimathi University engage in weekly programs that involves business talks,
technical meet-ups and creatives’ sessions.
He was followed by Ngesa Marvin who talk
about Open Source Community and Google developer Groups. He explained how
enthusiastic developers interested in learning more about new technologies can
come together to learn, practice, collaborate and share experience about Google
technologies.
He also explained how they hold meetings and
organize events like Code Sprints, Hackathons and schools challenges. He
clarified that the meetings are and will always be free and open to anyone. He
encouraged them to form and join such communities.
He was immediately followed by Evelyn
Kaberere who gave a talk on what Women Tech Makers is all about and how the
program provides visibility, resources and community. She gave them various
reasons why they needed to be programmers to encourage them indulge more into
code. Various Women Tech Makers videos were shown about various women in the
Tech industry.
Kithinji Muriungi then introduced
microcontrollers used in the Internet of Things projects. He explained what
microcontrollers are and how they work. These are basically self-contained
system with peripherals, memory and a processor that can be used as an embedded
system. Most programmable microcontrollers that are used today are embedded in
other consumer products or machinery including phones, peripherals, automobiles
and household appliances for computer systems. He then explained the different
types of microcontrollers such Intel Edison, Arduino and Rapbery pi. He talked
about how developers can chose the best micro controllers for their projects.
He then listed the various applications of microcontrollers and the projects
they have worked on. He also discussed how developers could start working with
them.
We then had a talk on Google’s recently
released library for Machine Intelligence, TensorFlow. Kennedy Jonyo explained how its flexible
architecture allows developers to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or
GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was
originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain
Team within Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization for the
purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but
the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other
domains as well.
Lastly we had a lengthy discussion and a mini — fireside
chat where developers were free to ask any question that from the whole team.
This include how we started, what keeps us to gathers, what motivates us among
others.
We understand and know the potential of a
developer community. GDG Kimathi University has in the past engaged with
different communities outside their locality and help them grow in to vibrant
communities. These include GDG Multimedia, GDG Egerton University, GDG Kabarak
University among others. Currently we are working with the following
communities:
·
Embu University
·
Moi University
·
Laikipia University
·
Muranga University
·
Riara University
We hope to work together, organize cluster
events and see them grow into successful communities. Cluster events normally
result into larger and potentially more impactful events. We hope to reach out
to as many people as possible and share our pioneer’s vision with
them — Sharing the GDG Love. Wes shall definitely keep you posted. Stay tuned!
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