I’m still amazed we were able to pull off a great event. This past weekend, We organized the first ever JAMstack meetup in Lagos and it was a huge success. The JAMstack community has been springing up in different parts of the world and being an enthusiast I was already having FOMO from all the events I’ve been seeing on the internet including the JAMstack Conference. So I made the decision to start a meetup in Lagos Nigeria, alongside my Co-Organizer William Imoh. We started making plans for the first event scheduled to hold May 4th.

Planning The Event

I already had an idea of organizing and planning events since I had hosted a meetup before. I wouldn’t have been able to pull this off without the help of William Imoh of course. We had to lock down dates, event theme, speakers, venue, and sponsors. Thanks to Netlify for giving me the first nudge they sponsored our meetup page subscription which I couldn’t afford at the time. We also had a couple of sponsors that made this event successful. Cloudinary, an Image Management Platform and Twilio, a Cloud Communications Platform also sponsored this event in some way and we are thankful for that.

Event Recap With Pictures

The event held at Andela Epic Towers on May 4th. After setting up the venue and guests started arriving. We had an amazing MC/Host Prosper Otemuyiwa.

At about 11:35 am he started off by welcoming the guests to the meetup and also introduced the first speaker for the day.

Oluwasetemi Ojo a software developer at Natterbase, gave a talk titled “Understanding JAMstack With Real Use Case”. He gave us a breakdown of how Freecodecamp and Gatsby Store currently use the JAMstack to power their architectures. His slides can be found here.

Lightning Talks

We also had two lightning talks from Prosper Otemuyiwa. The first talk was about JAMstack API’s. Here Prosper demystified the A in JAMstack. He gave super useful examples of API we can leverage when building with the JAMstack. You can find his slides here.

The second speaker Ekwuno Obinna a Media Developer Expert at Cloudinary who came all the way from Enugu Nigeria! He gave a talk titled “Is Your JAMstack App Really JAMstack?” In his talk, he outlined ways we can better handle media such as images and videos using Cloudinary. Here are his slides.

After Obinna’s talk, Prosper gave us his second lightning talk about ways we can engineer faster web experiences in plain sight. He dropped tips and tricks on how we can build fast loading experiences for users on the web. His slides can be found here.

The last agenda we had for the day was a closing remark by William Imoh. He talked about each of our sponsors Twilio, Netlify, and Cloudinary and the services they provide. We also had 3 minutes slots for anyone that has something to pitch to the audience this is inclusive of job opportunities, ideas and a chance to advertise your startup like Prosper and I did.
That brought us to the end of the event. We spent the remaining time networking and also we had stickers, food, and drinks for the guests.

Conclusion

I was really excited to see a small idea I had spring up into something successful and it gladdens my heart. I wouldn’t have done this alone so thanks to My OG William Imoh, Prosper Otemuyiwa and Perry Eising from Netlify. We hope to continue having more events over the next couple of months so keep your tabs open so you don’t miss out. JAMstack is the future and we don’t want anyone missing out on that train. Till next time! 👋