Don't trust the ecosystem

I was supposed to have a 'date' yesterday afternoon but my date had a couple of reasons to cancel it. I was a little disappointed but thankfully, I had invited a co-techie over so we had a handful of gists. I, being a newbie in the community, had a lot of listening to do. He summed up with one piece of advice "don't put much trust in the 'ecosystem'"

This was affirmed when I got a digest mail from the Lagos GTUG which I am a member of. The mail introduced a Google site created by one of it's members to connect local developers. No, the concept is not bad in itself, in fact it is wonderful. But if this invention was not a part of what I and the creator discussed in my bid to get him to join the CSC Lounge team, I wouldn't be posting this blog.

A couple of weeks back, Jide and I decided that the job at CSC Lounge was getting too much. We had more on our TODO list than we have on our DONE list, so we decided to hire the service of a creative personnel to ease off the stress. After a couple of considerations, we shortlisted a few people whom we should approach. We decided that we each talk to our acquaintance. Mine was a guy I met at a tech event I attended earlier whom I thought would make a good teammate.

After discussing a handful of the idea, the prospects and the benefits with him, we did a little brainstorming and pruning. I would say the discussion went well and he promised to get back to me with his final decision. I was expecting his call or e-mail -- well quite! The call or e-mail never came. Then I got the mail about his invention.

The worst part of his lack of personal creativity is that he used the same name as CSC Lounge but with a little twist! (CSC stands for Computer Science)

Google, our host on the tech user group which we both are members of, run with the policy "don't be evil". Hmmm... I smell some evil playing out.

Meanwhile, I'm having a second look at developer ecosystems, I think my techie friend (who visited yesterday) is right in a lot of ways.

CSC Lounge

Around this time last year, I was in my (supposedly) final year in school and I wanted to leave a legacy. I spoke with Jide -- one of the few people who are my close confidant -- about it. Jide was my roommate the previous session, so we had gotten very close. This thought spawn a lot of ideas which we shared between ourselves. None clicked until one night, while Jide, Ola (another classmate and one of Jide's roommates) and I were chilling in Jide's room, a random idea came for us to create a website for all classmates to keep contacts after school. It would also allow past computer science students to mentor subsequent computer science students. Also it would showcase students whose got skills and are doing stuffs.

That night, as it evolved, the idea spawn away from the original concept to a facebook-like application for our class + the mentorship thingy. We were preparing for our final year fun events (beach parties, barbecue nights, dinner, etc) and we would use the project to woo corporate firms to pay for our funtimes. As more people in the class heard of it, required features grew wider and more facebook-like but we still went ahead with it anyway.

Being the most experienced developer in the class and the one who nurtured the idea to growth, I tasked myself to raise the team who would build the application and also to interface with the corporate guys. I raised a team of 4 guys and 2 girls and gathered e-mails of the corporate contacts.

I exchanged a few e-mails with my corporate friends and things seem to be going fine. Corporate friends were responding, team was enthusiastic and in our first meeting, I coined the name "CSC Students' Lounge" for the application, CSC is what we call computer science in The University of Lagos. The name was agreed upon by the team as a temporary name, for lack of a better name. I created the requirements for our facebook-like, CSC Student's Lounge. Little red riding hood was still hopping happily!

After two or so meetings, team members started giving excuses on why they would not be able to make it to the next meeting. Then subsequent meetings turned into inspirational sessions, as I had to start telling team member how the project could boost their CVs. Corporate friends were still responding, but you need an application to sell now! So I kept corporate friends on a hold and began re-strategising. Couple of weeks after, app was not done and team inspiration was down, so I began droping team members. In fact, some even came to me and requested to resign. Finally it droped to Jide and I, and I had to revisit the idea.

I dropped all the facebook-like features and it returned to just mentoring. Then one event occured which made me incorporate articles. A computer science student from a remote university came to UNILAG and met us presenting a project we did for a course in information technology (CSC421). My team's presentation (and me in particular) impressed him, so after the presentation he approached me, introduced himself and told me how he enjoyed my display. He told me he was very interested in computer science but because stuffs like that does not happen in his school, his interest was begining to wane. He now reads computer science just to pass exams and get his degree, yet he told me how he would love for people to bring stuffs like that to them. He said a lot of students would embrace it with open arms. The idea of experts putting-up articles at intervals for students' consumption was born! A lot of other ideas came along and brainstorming with Jide, we prunned them until they came out right. We also called the application "CSC Lounge".

We sat down to implement and when we were done with the first working prototype, we began to think of how to get it up online. We were not regular income earners so raising cash for hosting was an issue. We needed to come up with stategies that would allow us raise cash while not getting our mind of the project. The only closest option was asking for contributions from friends and acquintances. We did that and after some time it worked and we were live.

Yesterday, 5th of April, 2011 at 6:05 AM WAT, we moved CSC Lounge to the root domain http://csclounge.com after running on a beta domain for exactly 2 weeks. What we currently offer is a platform which acts as a technical dump for people who do stuffs in the industry -- they could dump things; from a single line tweak to a fully flegded article. Students then ask them questions based on their dump. This way they mentor students and they keep the interests burning.

A lot of other great features are coming along (and a redesign too). This is because we are not just the everyday blogging platform (like the one you are on now). We aim not only to answer the question "What can I get from the platform" but also "What can I do with/on the platform". Some of the features are already even implemented, just waiting to be released.

The URL again is http://csclounge.com and it's open only to verified students and selected experts. We hope users enjoy using it as we enjoyed working on it.

Facebook: http://facebook.com/csclounge
Twitter: http://twitter.com/csclounge

P.S.
I'm dedicating CSC Lounge to everyone who has, in one time or the other, being my protege. To my current protege Dumebi Duru, who would never see me online on Facebook and let me be, but would always have one question or the other to ask. I hope you grow in your quest and become one of the bests.
To my ex-classmate and ex-protege Bukky Osi (was also on the team but pulled out) whom during those class assignment, I would explain to her what to do and she would come back with the tasks done. Your interest and development still impress me, I wish you could dare more and certainly hope you become a name to reckon with.
To all my other numerous proteges, you'll soon get a couple more mentors ;)

#JustReflecting

This month makes it six months since I unofficially left home -- that is, if you want to see me, my primary address is not where my parent stays (even tho I don't yet have a personal primary address). And really it has been nothing short of what I expected, tho it gets to the extreme sometimes.

I love to dare, it's just in me, crazy unthinkable things. I've lost count of them. I personally believe that in the journey to manhood, a young man should leave the confines of security and venture into the jaws of the real world, especially men who do not want to live obscure lives. After all, anything which would not kill you would make you stronger. That's what led me out.

Over this period, I've been stuck at the road a number of times due to bad traffic (Lagos na!) A lot of these time, I would wish I'd just go home to mumsi food but I'll realize it's far away. At some other times, I've also looked into my wallet to discover that it's not smiling at me and I've had to take drastic decisions to salvage my state (like take molue, instead of the comfort of BRT or danfo, after which I'll almost always swear never to board a molue again, lol). Even tho I'm not very good with money, I've kinda improved over this little time. I've also made a few families away from my family of birth -- the Ademilua's, the Claudius-Cole's -- places where I can call 'home' and and do some house chores when I wake up in the morning (after sleeping from 5 to 9am due to overnight hacking + I'm also not good with house chores too).

I know greatness beckons and I'm sure these experiences would only make the story sweeter. I'm very grateful to my lovely parents for being liberal enough to trust me in handling (and experimenting with) my life even though most times they do not understand what I do (my mom still asks me for explanations on what I do on the computer all night, even though I've explained a gazillion times. I guess I must be terrible at explaining).

Over time, I've also learnt that you do some things wrong a number of times before you finally start to do them right. Right now, I'm learning how to sell my products and I think I'm doing terribly badly. I'm not very bothered 'cos I know I'll improve with time. Besides, at this stage, I can always run back home and get re-embossed when things get out of hand.

#JustReflecting

Yeah... crazee me!

I thought I was crazy, now I realized I'm not actually crazy, I'm super crazy!

Sitting my own o, jeje in the lab reading for a test when one chic decide to start staring at me. Me I stared back o! Then we started doing "first to look away"... After some time, she burst into laughter and turns away, and actually walks away. I smiled and followed her and asked: "Didn't ur mommy tell u not to stare at strangers?" Then we started talking. I got all her details and when when I wanted to leave I asked for her number. She refued to drop it (in the typical Unilag chic spirit!) Then I told her to hold on to my phone that I would call my number whenever I wanted to speak with her. She took my phone and I walked away, went back to continue reading for my test.

My test av finished now and she is refusing to pick my phone. Armed with her name, department and level, I headed to the faculty of social sciences to find this chic, to no avail. I have a gazzilon calls to make and 20% of me is asking myself why I did it, 50% is amazed at the crazee thing I just did and 30% is just indifferent. :D

I'm closing in on her sha, I've gotten a few people who are in her department but not in her level. Next is to find people in her level but for now I'm taking a break. If you call me any time soon, maybe a chic would pick the phone nd say "hello"!

P.S. After a lot of pressure from my pops (the latest being holding a mirror to my face and asking me "how do you think you look?"), I've finally cut my hair! Now I adorn a low punk. I think it kinda looks nice and makes me look extremely different. I actually went home last weekend hoping to blow my hair, but after a little thinking, I realized I would be stepping into a lot of offices and they could be judging me by the hair I wear. So I decided to play by the rules! Anthony have blown his hair though (badt guy!). I didn't get to see how he looks before he went to school, cos he left in the morning and I arrived in the afternoon. Home is now funnier, Chima is at home :)

Passed out!

It was Sunday 5th December 2010, my parent just had a thanksgiving session for the silver jubilee of their wedding, hours later I was wasted... passed out and throwing up. That was the best day of the year so far!

To celebrate my dad had gotten some wine (13% alc) but I was not in the mood for wine so I took a few sips and requested for some beer (6.5% alc). Midway into the beer, he offered me rum (45% alc), I turned it down. Then the lady staying just opposite our place came in and at the spot, downed one and half glass of rum! In my head I was like, "shuo, see this tin wey I dey run from na em this chic come down like say notin dey inside." I took the challenge and after my beer, I started with the rum! Mumsi was there givin me those eye that she would give me when I was 7 if she disapproves of what I was doing in public, those eyes that says "stop that!" Me I no send am, I just throway my face.

Then it was me and popsi, the guests were gone and the guy was just jisting me about his bachelorhood and his adventures while I was downing more glasses of rum. Momsi had left the sitting room for us 'cos she disapproves of the heavy drinking. Anthony took a few wine and went to bed, so it was just me and my old man. We were gisting, laughing, demonstrating, hitting each other - a typical beer parlour setting. Gradually, I was shifting away from the realm of reality. I finished the bottle of rum and took the remaining of the only glass my dad was sipping all along, then I went to bed. But the whole drama was yet to begin.

I don't know how long it was into my sleep before I started throwing-up, can't tell what was happening except that Anthony and my dad was tending to me. My dad later told me that I was throwing up for about 2hrs 30mins. He said, after I offloaded every food in me, I started offloading the drinks, then he started getting scared. He was afraid of what would happen if the was nothing left in me to throw-up, according to him, I could start throwing-up blood. Of course, they kept it all away from momsi, they had to. In my drunken state, I could see the fear in his eyes, so I thanked him for letting me drink to stupor and sharing with me the way he did. He gave me some milk and it was all settled. I went back to bed.

It was 5am the following morning when I finally woke up. Anthony told me I messed-up everything. It was so funny to me. I was glad that finally, I had experienced what it was like to be passed out. I'm not a teetotaller, but because of my upbringing, I drink responsibly. Secretly though, I really want to experience the whole getting drunk and throwing up thingy. I couldn't be more appreciative to my pops, for letting me experience it in the security of home. When he awoke, he had a few words of advice for me. He let me know that he wouldn't be proud if he heard that I was in such a state outside home and I assured him that I would never be in such state again, ever! I plan on keeping my words.

I had a pile of bedsheets to wash while mumsi mocked me and called me a drunkard...

Raising Successors - The Celestine Discipleship.

It's no longer news that I won't be graduating with my class, what I pray for is that my best plans work out.

Due to my discovery that there's limited supply of developers, I've started a discipleship program. I call it The Celestine Discipleship. I intend to try my best in imparting the knowledge I have accumulated over the years on computer science students, at least make them able to convincingly win the National Challenge of the Imagine Cup and put-up a good international representation.

The program: Endorsed by the H.O.D of Computer Science, University of Lagos; Extra-Curricular; F-O-C. I already have one disciple and I'm on a hunt for suitable students for recruitment. I hope to build a small bread of self-confident software developers whom I'll ultimately absorb into my start-ups. By the end of the program, among other software development thingy, they should be very competent in Java, C# and Scala programming languages. Hopefully, they would get some silverware for themselves too - maybe Google Code Jam or Microsoft Imagine Cup trophy.

I'll try my hands on this while I'm serving my self-imposed extra session. It would work out, I'm very positive.

P.S. Waltag's searching for investors. If you know anyone we can talk to holla at me and we'll send our business proposal to the person (individuals only, please). Thanks ;)

Waltag... The challenges so far!

Over a period of almost a year, David and I have iterated through a couple of specifications for a social web platform we are actively trying to make a reality; Waltag. The whole idea streams from the concept of making your school life more interesting. Also, to keep memory of all those nitty-gritty which would linger after school but one just can't place a grasp of it. We hoped to achieve this by letting users log what happens in their rooms! So how have we fared?

When the idea first emerged, we wanted to know what was happening in students' rooms, simple. They would tell their story via several means; words, images or videos. Oh! They would also be able to share links. Then there was the idea of a group chat feature. With great excitement, we created a development blog, got a business adviser, and did a couple of other things. It was fun; we would get it ready in three months. Then reality set in.

Challenges.

Of course, all projects have their challenges, Waltag wasn't any different. Connecting the dots now, the challenges were inadequate skill set, inconclusive decisions and lack of funds. Before I saw these, I thought, "both of us are currently computer science students and Waltag is a software project, this should be easy considering that a few months earlier, I lead a team of student programmers to win the local Imagine Cup". I was wrong. When I realized the shortage in skills, we tried to make up with getting people to handle different aspects of the development. To date, we have iterated over ten people in our search for the skill set we need. We have settled with two of them and are yet to decide on a final person. Abubakar whom I competed with at the local Imagine Cup challenge would handle the mark-ups. To kill the issue of funds, Samuel, a former schoolmate of both David and I who had experienced 'work', was picked. We had Ayo on graphics but he needs a lot of inspiration to share the Waltag dream unlike Anthony, my younger brother. Even though (when I last assessed him) he was not as good as Ayo, Anthony shared the Waltag dream. We are currently considering the option of having Anthony handle the graphics, though he does not know that yet.

The real challenges.

Putting aside the challenges which arise directly from the project (which is quite easy to deal with), the biggest challenge was personal differences and school (and activities associated with it). David is a very religious person, and when we conceived Waltag, he was a member of the executive council of a foremost students' fellowship LVCU. Also, unlike me, he likes to get very involved in a lot of things. I am extremely less religious and less involving too. This sharp contrast in personalities brought a lot of conflict in decisions which had to do with implementation date, whom to hire, share allocation and many things that concerns personal interests. This is made worse by my inherent desire to control, to be in charge, to dictate strategies. When I decided that school was an inhibition to our successfully releasing Waltag on the scheduled date (I haven't changed my opinion on that though), I decided to defer school (which I wasn't enjoying after all) and crazy as I was, I wanted to pull David into my personal decision. lol. With persuasions from a lot of concerned fellows (but most especially because of my mom's long face whenever she remembers that I'm deferring school), I decided to take less courses each semester of my final year and extend school by one more session. Yet school is still as energy sapping as ever. The plan is to release Waltag within the period of my stay in school and watch the acceptance level while still a student before I start administering from outside.

Ideas, Inspirations and all the I's.

So far, a couple of ideas that we developed during the iteration of Waltag has been implemented in mainstream social network sites. For instance, twitter now asks ‘What's happening?’, Waltag’s initial handle for being different from everyone else (as opposed to "What are you doing?" which was twitter's question when Waltag first went into implementation phase). Google buzz was also launched which adds direct status pop-up and live status feeds, Waltag's original idea. One of the things we have realized during the course of this project is that, whatever you are thinking of now is probably being considered by another industry giant, the faster you act the more original you are. We also learnt that the route between ideas, design and implementation, testing and marketing is a very long one (especially when you are in a third world country like Nigeria). Yet we are not deterred. We have either dropped ideas which are conflicting or modified them to be better (or, at least what we think is better). We have also stolen stuffs (even as little as inspirations) from ambitious projects by university students, the latest being the Diaspora project. I look forward to users accessing Waltag as a custom seed from a Diaspora XMPP server soon (of which I was planning on implementing an XMPP server specifically for Waltag). Waltag has all those concepts in it's stitches, all the concepts Diaspora stands for.

So far, so good...

The Waltag project is growing, we just got our domain up and we are working on putting-up a waiting page there. We have fixed a date for the first alpha release. We are coding. We are organising. We are designing. We are raising funds.

The Waltag team currently comprise of:

Celestine Ezeokoye (that's me). Codes and Strategy

David Ademilua. People and Operations

Abubakar Ango. Web and Servers

Samuel Iso. Funds and Business

...and on the queue we have:

Anthony Ezeokoye. Logos and Graphics (I hope we clear his hire soon and he accepts our offer!)

Personally, I would love to say thank you to everyone who in one way or the other (even as little as asking 'how far?') has contributed to reminding us that we have a task at hand. The entire Waltag team is grateful. We know that Nigeria (and Africa) is capable of creating quality software systems and exporting them for the world to enjoy. We believe Waltag would be a major step in that direction. We know it would.