F8 Party Harare Meetup
The much anticipated and soundingly exciting annual Facebook Developers Conference otherwise known as the F8 Party was held on the 1st-2nd of May this year. The major conference was held in San Francisco, CA and Facebook Developer Circles around the world gathered for their ‘mini F8 Meetups’ featuring live streaming of the keynote speaker form the conference in San Jose USA. Facebook Developer Circle: Harare F8 Party which was hosted by Impact Hub Harare was no exception.
The event began at 4pm with an icebreaker led by the Impact Hub Harare Team. It is common notion that everyone expects a developer circle event to be a boring session with lengthy talks and presenters blurting out artificial intelligence and computing terminology but surprisingly it was much to the contrary and very accommodative. Insightful presentations came from enthusiastic young minds whose eagerness to develop technologies that can bring people closer together cannot be underestimated.
Kudzai Chasinda gave a very insightful presentation on Virtual Reality, attendees marveled at the endless opportunities that VR offers to users . Dr Panashe’s presentation on Artificial Intelligence kept everyone on the edges of their chairs as it shed light on aspects of deep learning that had never been perceived before.An engaging discussion rose over the idea that deep learning surpasses machine learning by a thousand times. Marlene Mhangami presented on the practical applications of tech in improving lives and Harvey Binamu shared with us a presentation on Facebook Messenger titled “Sometimes the stars just align, I had no idea what i was doing”
We did not miss a cough from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address, which followed our local presentation. He spoke on behalf of the Facebook team which has been facing challenges for long over the Cambridge Analytica lawsuits. Everyone agreed he was so humourous during his address that attendees almost forgot he is the CEO of Facebook. ‘Awesome tools are coming up soon, with whatsApp introducing group video chats’, he said . New tools are being launched for Facebook, a ‘Groups Tab’ as well as a new tool for dating. It was also announced that every developer circle lead would be walking away with an awesome Oculus VR kit pre-installed with apps and 3D games!
We then continued with our session while we enjoyed awesome treats prepared specially by Chef Kundi from Palates one of the Impact Hub members There was time for networking before the event finally came to a close at 9 pm. Overly the turnout was amazing and the engagement during the session was astounding.
To be part of more events hosted by the Facebook Developers Circles: Harare please join their Facebook group using this link.