A group of more than 200 developers, CTOs and product managers gathered on Tuesday, November 28 to learn first-hand about Facebook technologies on the sidelines of the RiseUp Summit 2017 event which kicked off last Friday, on December 1st.
The Facebook Partner Developer workshop in Egypt is the sixth one organized by Facebook in the Middle East and Africa region in the last six months.
“A workshop is a full-day event where we brought engineers from Facebook to provide hands-on instructions via tech-talks about Facebook technologies and updates on the latest Facebook Platform products,” Zak El Fassi, Manager of Platform Partnerships at Facebook, told Startup MGZN.
“So, we partnered with RiseUp this year in order to host this workshop in collaboration with them. Practically, what that means is that it is a satellite event of RiseUp Summit,” El Fassi added.
Five Facebook engineers, including El Fassi, delivered the workshop which involved six sessions. The sessions were mainly about the developers’ mindset, the Facebook products, media on Facebook Messenger as well as Messenger as a platform for businesses and finally Facebook analytics.
“Developers and startups are one of the main ecosystem multipliers and the way we think about developers and various startups is how to enable them to move faster through programs that we are doing. Everything we do is aimed at empowering developers and startups to grow and shine,” El Fassi said.
During the RiseUp Summit, Facebook had four talks. The talks, according to El Fassi, vary from topics about “The Speed of Feed” which goes around how people think in the age of feed and what attracts them to certain content than the other to another talk about how Facebook thinks about the developers’ community and what Facebook has been doing in the region for that. Facebook will also organize a workshop titled “Ask Facebook” which will be an open platform where participants can ask technical related questions.
RiseUp Summit is the largest entrepreneurship and innovation event in the Middle East and North Africa region which takes place every year in Cairo. RiseUp Summit’s main purpose is to connect startups and developers to the most relevant resources worldwide.
“Egypt is a very important market for us. It definitely has many opportunities to connect with local talents. And we are open to more collaborations and partnerships to empower those talents,” El Fassi said.