Two days to #Concatenate2019

Daniel Iyanda -

The second edition of the Concatenate Conference—a free conference for African developers—will begin in two days.

This edition of the Concatenate Conference is a massive improvement from the previous edition. The first edition, which held in August 2018, was a two-day event in Lagos with only 15 sponsors, eight of whom were bronze-level sponsors. This year's edition, however, has over 70 financial sponsors, including individual and corporate sponsors such as Cloudinary, AMP Project and Gatsby.

Starting on Wednesday, October 9, 2019, the conference will run for seven days, across Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya. In Lagos, workshops will be held on October 9-10 and the conference will hold on October 11-12. The same will hold in Nairobi on October 15 and 16, respectively.

The Zone Tech Park, which was the venue for the maiden edition, is the Lagos venue and the United States International University Africa is the venue in Nairobi.

Concatenate Conference was started as a compensation for Nigerian developers who can't attend international conferences due to visa rejection. This is why Christian Nwamba (AKA Codebeast) teamed up with Sarah Drasner, Head of Developer Experience at Netlify, to host bring Concatenate Conference to Nigeria.

With the expansion into Kenya, the conference is poised to become a continental pride, a yearly congregation of Africa's tech talents.

Although tickets for the main conference are sold out, you can still register for the workshops, which will not be streamed live.

In 2018, tickets were sold out in a day, and this year,  tickets were sold out in few hours. The organizers, including Simona Cotin, Gift Egwuenu and Silm Momoh, have promised that people on the waitlist will be given preference next year.