The Drupal Nigeria Community

I honestly should try to get better at this! It's been 18 months since my last post & honestly this isn't encouraging at all.

There actually is a Drupal community in Nigeria. The Drupal Nigeria Group obviously seems to be the most active 'community' & it ought to be. Nigerian Drupalers meet from time-to-time on the job, at geek meetups, while collaborating on projects or just hanging out.

There have been 2 previous Drupal Nigeria events in Lagos & a 3rd is in the pipeline - DrupalCamp Lagos 2011.

While we strive to get our act together & strengthen our community, the ultimate factor for the growth of this community will be participation.

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Getting Started with Drupal in Nigeria: Challenges & Opportunities

5 years ago, I decided to switch the focus of my IT Career from core system & network engineering to programming. There were numerous reasons for this, one of which was scratching my own itch, solving my own problem. (More on this in a later post - if you are interested, please send in a reminder via a comment or a personal message). One of the best pieces of advice I got when I asked the question "How do I become a programmer?", came from a rather cocky fellow who advised me to "read a good book!"

Sometime last year, I searched for & revisited that post. I had to admit that I had received the best piece of advice that has guided my steady progress in the software development industry. There is more to becoming a better programmer/developer than just "reading a good book", but make no mistake about it, that's the best place to start.

This piece of advice definitely applies to Drupal. Before I delve into what Drupal is & what Drupal isn't (in this post and others to follow), let me reiterate that you are going to need to read a good Drupal book. And there are many. But that may not be enough if you intend to make a little money, a career or a fortune from building Drupal-based web applications. You'll need to combine your book-reading with a number of other learning skills & opportunities to get the best value from your time, effort & potential.

I'll try my possible best to guide you such that what has taken me close to 2 years to wrap my head around, should take you about 2 months or less. In addition, I'll be blogging from the Nigerian point-of-view, the view that takes into consideration PHCN (Nigeria's state-owned epileptic power company), "narrowband" Internet widely available/affordable all around the country, and much more "Nigerian" factors.

Looking forward to hearing from Drupal enthusiats, newbie & experts. If you have any specific requests you'd like me to cover in upcoming posts please feel free to post a comment here or send me an email via codeweavernaija@gmail.com.