FlutterBytes, a Flutter conference in Lagos

Context

In 2022 there was no Flutter conference in Nigeria. There were meetups, and there were a lot of Flutter developers, and the two did not add up to a day where the whole community was in one room.

A few of us decided to build one. Planning started in September 2022 and the first FlutterBytes Conference ran in Lagos on 5 November 2022. I have been a co-founder and the conference lead since, and I still sit on the organising committee for the fifth edition on 30 and 31 October 2026.

Problem

A conference in Lagos has the problems every conference has, and a few of its own. Venues want payment up front. Sponsors want numbers you do not have yet in year one. Speakers need to be found, briefed and, for anyone travelling, helped through logistics that are not simple. And the whole thing has to be worth a Saturday for several hundred people.

Constraints

A volunteer committee with day jobs. I was building wallets at Cake and leading engineering at Raptures through every edition.

A budget that depends on sponsors who mostly decide late.

A city where power, traffic and rain can each change the day’s plan.

Decisions and trade-offs

Annual, in person, in Lagos. There were arguments for online, for smaller and more frequent, and for moving around. We chose one big day a year in the same city because the point was the room: people who had only known each other online meeting in person. The cost is that a lot rides on one date.

A theme each year, and a stage for local speakers. 2023 was “Africa Flutterverse”. The speaker list has always mixed people with international profiles and people giving their first conference talk. That takes more briefing work than booking known names, and it is the part of the conference I care about most.

Keep going between editions. In May 2024 we ran a three-session Build with AI series online, and the conference has a community that meets through the year. A conference that only exists in November is easy to forget by March.

Put the conference where the ecosystem can find it. I added the 2025 edition to the community-maintained Flutter conference index, and I contributed to the 2023 conference site. Small things. They are how a Lagos conference ends up on a list next to the ones in Europe.

What was hard

Year one. No track record, no numbers, no relationships with sponsors. About 500 people came anyway.

Doing it every year while doing everything else. The conference has never been my job. It has been a second one, from September to November, for four years running.

Result

Five editions. The conference site records about 500 attendees in 2022, 400+ and 20 speakers in 2023, 500+ and 28 speakers in 2024, and 600+ attendees, 35 speakers and 32 sessions in 2025.

I gave the day-two keynote in 2024, “The Global Impact of African Flutter Engineers”, and in 2025 the opening keynote, “AI’s Impact on the Next Generation of Mobile Apps”, plus a talk on the multi-chain wallet work at Cake, “The Daily-Driver Wallet: Multi-Chain, Private, and Built for Real Life”.

The 2026 edition is on 30 and 31 October at Zone Tech Park, Lagos.