Earlier this month I attended a meetup organized by AWS USER Group in Abu Dhabi. It was my first time engaging in such an event outside Sudan and it touched me in some ways. The presenter dedicated time before starting the workshop to state the importance of giving back to the community. This has inspired me to blog about my experience in organizing such a community in Sudan.

In 2019, Moutaman a colleague and friend whom I consider a great Software Engineer with a creative mind, reached out to me with the idea of creating a community specifically for developers. Since I had already volunteered and planned several events at that time, I immediately accepted. Adding to that, Moutaman also introduced me to Momen, a tech-savvy and nerdy software engineer, so we got started right away.

The lost and confused feeling that many people have after graduating from college is one of the main problems that is indeed a universal experience many people have. We wanted to form a lovely community that would provide guidance and support while pursuing the career journey. On top of that, keeping up with new tech and motivating the members to experience and explore new things. From there the motto came “A community by developers for developers.”

We had our first meetup in October 2019 and it was a huge success, on the other hand, we didn’t stop at meetups, we had a weekly discussion series “Friday’s Discussion” that was conducted on Sudev's Facebook and Twitter pages.

As the wave of Covid came in 2020 and everybody was working from home, there was the idea of having a podcast as conducting meetups wasn’t an option. The Sudev Podcast came to light, and we emphasized the point that it wasn’t just another technical podcast but a space to discuss challenges and the overall well-being of devs, and for that, the first episode was about the importance of communities, yes I’m interested in the topic since day 1 :) , Unfortunately, as it’s been such an effort to prepare and record episodes with limited time and resources, we only launched 3 episodes.

Along with that what a dev community without its Discord server!, at this point Sudev was growing and the social media platform wasn’t enough, at this stage amazing devs had recommended running and managing Sudev Discord Server, it was something great to watch your community members be autonomous and collaborating.

Unfortunately, things have been tough lately, and my friends and I were overburdened by life. However, I think that right now, more than ever, we need sudev. The war in Sudan has disrupted and most of the population has fled the nation. In addition, the market in the area is unpromising, and developers are unsure about their career choices.