BRANDON.T.BANDE // ROGUE0015

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Around and Back

· 6 MIN READ · ·

  • tech-community
  • zimbabwe
  • africa

Hi,

I'm Brandon.

Funny thing: several AIs have pinpointed my monotonous intro as a weakness in my writing (I kinda use AI to review my work now and ask it how I can be better). And boy oh boy, I am not gonna change that. It has been three weeks since my last article, and I was supposed to follow up the No Data, No Problem with a technical article... up to now, I haven't.

In the past two weeks, I have travelled to Cape Town for PyCon ZA, where I gave a talk around the 16,000 jobs trilogy. Then I was organising Zimbabwe's biggest tech conference (DevFest Harare). In between the travel, talks and organising, my time to blog got limited. So let's dive into the past two weeks, and then I will share the gist of what has been up. First up: PyCon ZA.

PyCon ZA

I submitted a talk proposal and a travel grant so long ago that I had forgotten all about it. I mean, I submit talks everywhere, and the rate of rejection is so high that I fail to keep track. PyCon Kenya and PyCon Africa had rejected my submissions (when I applied for PyCons, I hazily daydreamed of a three-week multi-country PyCon tour, lol). With two rejections, I was expecting that this was another rejection.

... then the acceptance came.

Just a week before, I got an email that my talk and sponsorship request were under consideration, and they wanted to confirm if I would be able to make it. It took 37 minutes to make up my mind... 37 minutes only. Let me break this down: if you follow the news, you know that South Africa is not the place to be for foreigners (or so I thought; the entire journey proved otherwise, though). Then there was the travel logistics: it was too late to arrange for a flight, and that meant a 41-hour journey via bus (I would not recommend this unless one has to). And then there was the issue of having my leave approved, lol (thanks to my bosses for being kind enough to release me).

... and the event

Arriving on Tuesday, I only had a few hours to rest before volunteering on beginners' day for a Humble Data workshop. One of the most pleasant surprises was meeting a fellow Zimbabwean community builder, who also happened to be a volunteer for the event, and over the next few days, we exchanged ideas, advice and memorable moments. As I delivered my talk on the final day of the event, the friends garnered during the event were in full support, and for some reason, my talk (title: Agents think, let's make them act: Integrating open-weight LLM into a system for autonomous deterministic operation) had garnered some interest (including Paul Everitt, the Paul Everitt), as open-weight large language models are becoming the next trend (frontier is a big word) within the AI space. The big thing that happened is that a picture of me giving my talk was actually included in Paul's slides (yaay). Beyond the talks, I chaired two sessions, introduced multiple speakers and learnt a lot from a conceptual and technical level. When I left Cape Town, my head was buzzing (from a few drinks the previous nights) and my legs hurting from clubbing with newly found friends.

... then came DevFest Harare

Coming from Cape Town and learning a couple of things, I really hoped we could implement them in Harare for our DevFest event. The plan was ambitious: getting a thousand techies under one roof for a day packed full of talks and workshops. The speakers were there; I mean, we had five Google Developer Experts as speakers and local speakers, and we had some money to support the event. The event came to pass, and yeah, it was okayish: turnout was not close to what I hoped for; the event did not go as smoothly as I expected (hard lessons from organising; this shege is delivered to me every year in different formats, lol). The team put in a lot of effort, but a lot also fell through the cracks.

... we had pre-event workshop sessions

Special thanks to Uncommon.org, we had a Flutter workshop for absolute beginners in the morning, led by a Google Developer Expert, and another session on Rapid Application Deployment and Context Engineering & MCPs, led by another Google Developer Expert and a brilliant upcoming techie in the Zimbabwean landscape. The numbers were a third of the expected.

... then the event

Half of the expected attendance. Sessions were on point (mostly), both in terms of content and delivery. But the ooooomph was not there, a certain spark that I was looking for. Maybe it was being overly ambitious, but my expectation was that this event would be the turning point that led to our community being marketable and giving it the momentum to be the voice of indie developers. Unfortunately, the wait continues, and I take my equal share of the blame. For the majority, the event went well, but looking from the lens of what could be, I hope we do better the next time.

Back to the story and the articles

So hey, this is what has been up, and ooh, by the way, I showed my trilogy to the audience at PyCon ZA (and I was kinda proud of that, lol). So I will wrap up my article on the Vision-SL project (which will be my talk at DevFest Lusaka later on during the year). It feels nice to be back, and till next time, ciao.

Let's connect via the following platforms: LinkedIn, on X as @Rogue0015, or check the Sessionize speaker profile if you want this signal live on your stage. And if you're new here, start with the talks — this blog is their echo.