Welcome ...
The TechStylers March 2022 Inspirational meetup was held on Saturday 26th March 2022. The hosts for the session were myself and Chioma Clare Okafor. Chioma is data analyst living in Swansea, United Kingdom. Additionally, Chioma is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, as well as being an Agile Scrum Master.
I kicked off the session and started with an introduction and welcome to members old and new. For new attendees, I explained that TechStylers is a group of women in tech who believe in empowering others. And that we all have a ‘super power’ which is using technology to solve real world problems!
I then handed over to Olajumoke Toriola, the co-founder of TechStylers, to provide an update on tech mentoring activities from Cohort 3.
Tech mentoring cohort 3
Part of what we do as TechStylers is to upskill women in various elements of the Microsoft stack. We do this by means of tech mentoring, provided by industry leading experts. Jumoke was officially closing out the most recent program – Cohort 3 – of the tech mentoring sessions. These had been split out into a number of areas;
The videos for each of these streams are available on the TechStylers YouTube channel. The Cohort had been exceptionally well attended, and we were going to showcase some of the successes as part of the inspirational session.
Power apps demos
Chioma then introduced the first of 2 exceptional power apps demos lined up to showcase the learning of cohort 3. This was a hugely inspirational demo from Jennifer Miapyen. Jennifer demoed the fully functional Power App she had built during Cohort 3 having had no prior tech experience! Jennifer really is a Citizen Developer in the making.
Next up we had Jannah Dulin who showed us a very comprehensive inventory app. We were all massively impressed with the amount of features it included. I think many of us identified with Jannah when she said she found Power Apps so easy to use, it was sometimes a challenge to stop adding more features.
Power BI demo
Our last demo of the evening came from Victoria Ongukola, who was showing us the Power BI dashboard she had built. Although she is a Power Platform developer, Power BI was a new skillset for Victoria. She had clearly mastered Power BI during her tech mentoring in Cohort 3!
Striving as a woman in tech
Our guest speaker for the evening was the incredible Olowatoyin Ifesanya, CEO of Makintouch Consulting . Toyin shared her experiences of running her own company as a woman. And she shared invaluable tips from lessons she has learned along the way.
A common thread with many of our speakers and members is that no matter where in the world we are, we share the same experiences. This time was no exception, So much of what Toyin shared resonated very deeply. I found myself either nodding or saying ‘hell yeah’ almost all the way through her presentation! I particularly liked the quote Toyin shared from a book called ‘Return to Love’ by Marianne Williamson …
” … Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate … Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves ‘who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world …”
This quote reminds me so much of a piece of prose called the ‘Desiderata‘ by Max Ehrmann. And particularly the line ‘you are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees or stars’. We all have our place, we have a right to be who we are. This embodies the principles that have always guided me, you can find the Desiderata on my mentoring pages.