For some time now, I’ve been looking forward to announcing the following news. Our dedicated team of Community Managers has increased today with the addition of Shodipo Ayomide! Please help me welcome him to our communities!
Shodipo, who goes by Ayo (pronounced “I-O”) brings 5 years of professional experience working as a full-stack engineer between companies. He was more of a JavaScript & PHP fan for those years but he has 9 years of experience in technology. While growing this experience, he worked many jobs both full-time and a number of contract jobs as an engineer. This eventually led him to notice online communities.
Ayo began developing a feel for dev communities when he got an offer as a software engineer from Techpoint, a Nigerian-based technology news publishing platform. He was able to attend events, learn and grow. He found himself appreciating the camaraderie with other developers. Ayo’s first event was actually a “Women in Tech” conference in Nigeria that he says was so much fun! When he realized that he deeply appreciated developer communities, he joined Developers Circles Lagos from Facebook as a co-organizer and that started it all. He now leads unStack Africa, a workshop-based community now present in 6 African countries, and co-organizes Open Source Community Africa, the largest open source community in Africa with chapters across all technically active countries in Africa. They’ve raised $73k for their Open Source Festival in February 2020 and flew top-level execs from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, GitHub, SAP, and more down to Nigeria for NaijaHacks, the largest hackathon ever in Africa which raised a total of $120k in sponsorships in 2019. As you can see, Ayo loves the developer community and that will help him to be a phenomenal contributor and leader of the Stack Overflow community.
Ayo believes as we do, that online communities are the future. Connecting everyone all at once in a community without traditional barriers like expensive entrance fees or travel expenses means that more people can be reached and conferences/meetups for larger audiences can be planned. We have various kinds of people in our online community and the fact that our focus is the online community means that we can effectively plan for each kind of community member without thinking about venues, halls, food, and more.
In his personal time, Ayo enjoys watching movies - think “Netflix party with friends & co-workers,” playing games, reading, building side projects, trying new food, traveling, meeting new people, and yes, spending time with his family. I’m sure we’ll be seeing lots of him around the network so when you run into him, please say hello and help him feel welcomed.