DevFest Addis 2018
The only thing familiar about Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is that it is on the African Continent, and hosts the headquarters of the African Union.
Ethiopia is an East African nation that is two hours by air from Nairobi and Entebbe, both of which I recently visited. That is the only relationship it bears with its neighbors. They don’t even drive on the same side of the road.
Addis Ababa was a huge cultural shock. The things we take for granted do not work there. The don’t issue MasterCard and Visa, so the citizens can’t purchase books or courses online, and as a result, can’t use Coursera, Udacity, or the Google Cloud Platform. Uber does not exist here, make plans for pickup from the airport before your arrival.
Project Fi does not work here, and if you have a SIM that roams here, calls can be expensive, even if all you are doing is receiving.
The country has only one telecom provider responsible for both fixed and mobile access.
I arrived Addis Ababa to talk about Machine Learning, TensorFlow, Keras, Dialogflow, Cloud ML APIs, and Cloud ML Engine. After spending six hours in the city, and realizing they could not make use of GCP, my plans became useless. I would need to come up with a new presentation.
I spent the rest of the day catch up with Aniedi and visiting the museum and Addis Ababa Institute of Technology. I would use the night and the rest of the morning to make new slides.
The DevFest was packed full with about 600 attendees. It started off with a keynote by Aniedi, who needed to catch a flight to attend to other community events back in West Africa. There were speakers from the U.S. Embassy, Gebeya, a gaming company, and a few other major players. The organizers really pulled it off.
There was also the launch of the Women Tech Makers chapter.
I had three sessions: a keynote, a fireside chat, and a codelab at the end of the event. There was a lot of interest from the audience, particularly from people who were interested in Machine Learning but had never heard of TensorFlow.
I had to base my non-technical ML keynote on Firebase ML-Kit and Dialogflow, because they do not require a credit card to get started. The technical aspect still covered TensorFlow and Keras.
My codelab was on getting started with Keras, and is now available here.
It was my last night in Addis Ababa, and I spent it learning more about the city and culture from some of the organizers. It is a completely different place, and I look forward to the language researchers doing some impressive work.
I recently read that an AI conference will be hosted in Addis Ababa in 2020. I hope I can attend it.
Thanks to Google Developers for approving and sponsoring this trip.
