Build Day 2020: Facebook Developer Circle Istanbul
It’s often said that the best way to learn is through teaching someone. For this year’s Facebook Developer Circles Community Challenge, participants were invited to create written tutorials that showcased features one of the following Facebook technologies:
- Open Source: Hack, React, React Native, PyTorch, Docusaurus
- Spark AR
- Wit.ai
- Messenger Platform
I will get more into the details of the Build day 2020, but let me first take you through the challenge details. To write the tutorial, participants needed to use one of the above mentioned facebook technologies and their code had to be Open Source.
To be eligible for the cash prize of $133,000 participants were required to submit the following:
- Written tutorial on GitHub (max 4000 words)
- Sampled Software on GitHub
- 2 minutes long walkthrough video
- MIT Open Source licensing
Here are the prizes for the winner teams or individuals:
For more information on the challenge and sources you can visit https://developercircles2020.devpost.com/.
Now let me tell you about the first virtual Build Day 2020 hosted by Facebook Developer Circle Istanbul community. We hosted our event online through Discord as it’s a great platform to create a channel and team room for the event participants. Our schedule was as follows:
10:00–10:15 —Opening speech by Aziz Ulak Co-Lead, Farida Elchuzade (ME!-facilitator) and Ezgi Alçiçek (facilitator), and announcement of challenge rules and requirements
10:15–10:30 — Speaker from Codeshake
10:30–11:00 — Coffe Break, creating teams
11:00–12:00 — Ugur Arici, Write the Docs Istanbul Education
12:00–13:00 — Lunch Break
13:00–17:00 — Working on tutorial and getting mentorship
17:00–17:30 — Announcing winners of lottery
This year, for the first time I got the chance to become a facilitator along with Ezgi Alçiçek. We got to plan out and organize the event with the help of our Co-Leads Aziz and Samet (Thank You!). During the Build Day event I also got the chance to lead and help a team mentoring about writing their tutorial. For this, I was prepared by doing research on previous projects, checking on tutorial writing, learning the guidelines of the challenge and watching videos of previous participants. Along with Ezgi (another facilitator) we gathered all the helpful sources and blog posts about tutorial writing which could be helpful during the submission.
Before our build day, all facilitators got the chance to join build day facebook group, where we were invited to online live presentations and Q&A about the event and the challenge. This was very helpful for the facilitators, especially for those who have not organized a challenge before. Thank you Angeline Capati for your full support with the challenge and the build day!
Although it was my first time facilitating a challenge event for developers, I must say it was one of the best experiences . I loved meeting new people virtually, engaging with developers and helping them find their way on writing a tutorial. As a result we had more than 5 teams from our Build Day event who wrote the tutorial and joined this global challenge (Best of LUCK!). Looking forward to host more challenges and events with Facebook Developer Circle Istanbul Community!
