Special people
Lorenzo Cabrini
kicking dirt around, let me mention a few special people here, the type
of people who you feel honored to have met and had a chance to know,
people whose talents and work I think should be something that we should
all try to derive inspiration from.
(In no special order):
* Emmanuel Okyere: honestly, this guy should officially be labelled a
Ghanaian natural resource. More precious than gold, he has skills that
many of us won't even begin to understand.
* Henry Addo: somebody I've known for a long time and have the deepest
respect for. If anybody thinks you need to go abroad to get anywhere in
life, think again.
* The Imbeah brothers: if I say that they have played an important role
in community building in Ghana, I'm undervaluing them. I'll always
remain grateful to PK for giving a chance to a certain young,
inexperienced web developer a few years back... :)
* Sabra Asante: Who would ever have had the will-power to keep
LinuxAccra going for all these years? Sabra has worked tirelessly to
keep the group alive, often without *any* help. I think all of us who
grew up with LinuxAccra owe Sabra this one favor: to come back and to
help out. The group needs us.
* Edem Morny: great developer, great friend. Need I say more?
* Isaac Johnson: while everybody else was talking a whole lot about
learning, Ziggy went to buy himself a bunch of used hardware and set up
an entire linux-based network in his room, locked himself up and began
to learn. And now it's beginning to pay off for him. I have nothing but
respect for you, my brother and friend.
* Guido Sohne: sadly departed from us, but his memory lives on with us.
Many of us owe a lot to Guido, without his tireless efforts I wonder
where we would be? Guido is a legend, period.
There are many others I should mention, such as all the great people I
met at AITI, KNUST and other places (you know who you are). If you feel
that I left somebody extra-super-special off the list, please feel free
to add your contributions.
When I, provoked into it by Guido at some random night club in Osu,
decided to throw away my quiet life of just coding and instead reach
out, share, assist, build, we had a mountain the size of Kilimanjaro to
climb up. I never honestly thought we would get anywhere. If it handn't
been for the strength of the giants around me, I would have kicked the
bucket and gone back to my coding sessions.
But now we have Ghanaian developers who travel the world for their
simply because they are good at what they do, we have Ghanaians who get
internships at Mozilla, Ghanaians who develop games for the iPhone, etc.
In other words, positive role models for future generations to look up
to. We have several active developer and open source communities where
ideas are shared, projects are launched, and so on. The future is
bright. Let's not forget it, and let's continue working so that we can
reach critical mass.
And by the way, it's a sad fact that there are not any women on the
list. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, they do, and I've been
fortunate to meet some (Ama, Daisy, to mention a few). I'd like there to
be more names on that list, not just to put some ladies there, but
because those ladies really have the skills to be worthy on the list. I
don't know what happened to the LinuxChix Ghana effort, but maybe it
should be revived if it has gone into hibernation.
I am growing old, angry, bitter and burned-out. My greatest skill is
making a total mess of my whole life. Right now, I'm next to useless. I
feel it and everybody knows it. But being able to witness how far we've
come, since the old days of a few of us playing around with FreeBSD
servers and Gentoo installations in a frigid cold server room in Tema,
now THAT makes me happy!
Personal
With all the things you help some of us to become, all I can say to you is a
big thank you and I'm personal grateful to you and all the long hours we spent
both here in Accra, Winneba and Akropong.
We thank you and will do our best to make you, ourselves and mother Ghana
proud.
Thanks and if I never said this to you before, I want you to know that you are
very good at building people and that is your greatest skill.
And I do agreed with you, most of the people you put on the list are true
reflection of you.
Thanks again.
