Cloud Study Jam Maputo - a short summary

Aided by Qwiklabs, as the tool for delivering the content i.e. the explanation, exercises and tracking progress we looked into:

• BigQuery - a fully-managed data warehouse that allows us to process data at petabyte scale, fast and easily, which we can use to import and query large structured datasets using the familiar/popular SQL language;
• Cloud SQL - a fully-managed database service, providing either MySQL or Postgres, for use in transactional or analytical processing;
• and Google Cloud Speech API - a REST service that allows us to get a transcript of audio sent to it. By nature of being a REST service we can use it with any kinds of apps (Android, web, etc.), and among many other use cases it is a door to solving the issue of data entry by use of audio.

The event was held at the Standard Bank incubator; it was sponsored by Google; and organized by the GDG Maputo and MozDevz communities.

The event had a lot of adherence and “got the house full”, among the adherents were professionals, students, people from other fields entirely, and even a 13-year-old who’s already dabbling into CS. This represents the thirst there is for learning and leveraging the Cloud and the new technologies it provides. Most of the participants were able to comprehend the concepts and complete the labs on time, which to me just shows how the barrier of entry is low, and that there’s actually so much low-hanging fruit to catch.

Last but not least, the students got free access to Qwiklabs for a month, which allows them to keep practicing at home and further honing their skills.

I have hopes of hearing in the near future of how the participants are applying the skills they learned to tackle their problems and of their communities.

To one more successful event, Cheers!