Codelabs and Hackathons and Contests.... Oh my!

Hackathon at the iHub in Nairobi

Hey there!

How is it going?

How have you all been?

Thank you for stopping by.

Its been a while since we last hung out, hopefully not too long though.

The last few months have been very very interesting to say the least.

To start with I was at my third Google I/O , arguably one of their biggest developer events in the world. It is always quite an experience to see how the future of tech is shaping up.

Also my wife (I called her my C.E.O) and I joyously welcomed our first child to our family (our little startup). The boy promptly declared that he was not satisfied with the position of director on the board and after subjecting us to a couple of sleepless nights made a case at an extraordinary board meeting to be made chairman of the board.  The motion was quickly passed and now he appears to be settled and happy in his new role of having the final word on all aspects of the company (family) affairs. In fact I had to take advantage of the fact that he is currently napping to start drafting this post. Its been an awesome and interesting experience. One thing I can relate it to is having a new smartphone that gets automatic OS updates every 12 hours. So you are constantly discovering new features….simply amazing!

So….back to the matter!

Like the title of the post suggests I want to invest this stolen time in talking about 3 event types that contribute to the lifeblood of any tech community. If you have been involved in anything tech in Africa in the last 4-5 years, you must at worst have heard these words mentioned at least once or at best attended or participated in at least one of them.  I want to talk a bit about them today because every time I mention them or I hear people refer to them I find that everyone has a very different understanding not necessarily of what they are, but of what they can (or are meant to) achieve. I would like to put down a few of my own thoughts on the subject, they may be right, they may be wrong...they may also change but what the hell….here goes. I will be leveraging on my experience (limited I might add) of participating in, facilitating and organizing a number of codelab events, hackathons and contests.

The Abyss of the Great Outdoors ....and the Spider Generation

I am slowly getting used to the fact that I will be lucky if get to write to this blog more than twice a year.
I had been meaning to put down a few thoughts for the past few months, but never got round to it. There a lot of reasons why I could not do it...but I will be honest today and tell you it was procrastination ...there ...i said it!

Cele’s Article

I was however jolted out my happy state of work filled bliss by an article on LinkedIn by my friend Celestine Ezeokoye which I think is well worth a read (its not a very long article...so go on...click the link). To give you a summary of what Celestine is saying: Nigeria already has a thriving tech industry. He goes on to list a number of heavy hitting Nigerian tech firms that were started locally by locals and have grown to become giants on the tech landscape and are doing quite well...to the extent that some of them have received up to 90M USD in funding and so on. Celestine encourages the current generation of tech entrepreneurs to do more to stand on the shoulders of the now established tech entrepreneurship giants who have done so much and learnt so much to achieve success in this rough socio-economic landscape that is Nigeria. He says that we should also do more to promote the successes of these guys who have silently gone about their business in building great tech companies that are looking to stand the test of time (Again...read the article, its not as long as this one).

No Techies on the front page

I remember sometime in September 2009 when news filtered out that the London Stock Exchange had concluded arrangements to acquire Millennium IT, a Sri Lankan software firm that had just developed and deployed what was at the time the world's fastest financial trading platform with the ability to process about 1 million orders per second for about 18 million pounds ....Sterling.

My excitement knew no bounds. For the next few days it was practically all I could talk about.

So much so that it prompted my then colleague Sogo to ask me:

" O boy why this thing de trip you like this? , in fact....wetin de power you ?"

Which in plain English roughly translates to:

"My friend, why is this news exciting you so much? In fact...what drives you? What are you passionate about?"

At the time I really could not give him a straight answer. I just knew that I was very excited. At the time I told him that the reason for my excitement was manyfold.

I de find developers (Boiling The Ocean)

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it's been like 10 months since my last blog post.
As usual so much water has passed under the bridge since we last had a chat. The tech ecosystem in Africa continues to make steady progress. While things are still a loooooooooong way from where they could be , there have been a number of positives to gloat about . For example more and more people are beginning to realize the value that tech hubs (or innovation spaces or shared spaces or whatever name you choose to give them) can bring to the ecosystem and have started to support them more. It is also heartening to see more events and competitions in the community ...organized by the community for the community such as the Africa Android Challenge and the Innovation Open Ideas event in Douala Cameroon. Interesting times ahead!!!

Anyways, now to today’s gist. I came across this this article some days back. Its a well written article with a lot of useful insights. I do feel however that it is not telling us anything new, that is unless of course you have been living under the proverbial rock for the past 2 years or so. Pretty much everyone has heard at sometime or the other that Africa is new frontier with the greatest growth prospects and all that jazz. The bit that caught my eye was a single sentence, that i know also caught the eyes of a couple of people.
“Though skills are in short supply, they are becoming more abundant”

No Old, Bold Developers....

So its been a long time!

So long that i had to use a search engine (guess which one!) to find the URL for my own blog!

My last post was like more than 5 months ago and i apologize….sincerely. 

Rest assured that the reason i have not posted anything in a while is not because nothing has been happening…..rather it is because too much has been happening.

In the past 5 months i have:

• Had lunch on the roof of the Co Creation Hub in downtown Yaba with a host of enthusiastic Naija coders and 4 other people almost as crazy as i am
• Met some awesome developers across the continent , one of whom i have christened "The Black DJ" after a remarkable product he built on the West coast of Africa to another who developed an Android keyboard for Amharic on the east side
• Carried out some eye opening cross-continent-research with my man Ato 
• Watched two Ethiopian girls put Willow Smith to shame :-)
• Twice bumped into ladies rushing out of the same men's room (yes men's room) i was walking into….in two different countries!!! (it is not a small something!)

As i am sure you would agree each of these items is worth a full blog post …or two but i would crave your indulgence to let me postpone all the gist to a later date.

The issue i would like to broach today if you have a few minutes is something that has come up in a few discussions i have been privileged to be part of in the last few weeks, an issue that even yours truly could be guilty of.

The African Programmer and the Sun

I thought of calling this blog post "The Software developer and the Sun" but i feel that "programmer" fits better.

Ah ah ah ah….if you are one of the uninitiated and want to ask me what the difference between a programmer (also known as a coder) and a software developer is, you may want to look at this post . 

The essence of that post is captured in excerpt below:

"Therefore a programmer is a person who produces code, usually after some sort of specification. This is focused on a specific functionality.

A software developer is producing a solution for the customer, with a big focus on customer satisfaction."

My own way of saying the same thing is that the difference between the two is that while one fears the hot sun, the other more or less embraces it.

RTFL...

So he steps out of the shower in the hotel this morning, 20 minutes before pick up and picks up the tube from the hotel complimentary cosmetics bowl. And starts to apply the lotion all over his body, however midway through he notices that the lotion is kind of sticky and greasey and does not dry off like its supposed to, oh well...maybe its a new type of lotion, its not like he uses lotion a lot anyways. He has always been a vaseline kind of guy (old skool) but since the lotion is there and its free....why not ? right?

Flying East….and Back

If you are a jazz fan then i am sorry to tell you that you may not be on the right page. You may be looking for this link (i also love the jazz band Fourplay so i could not resist pulling this one on you)

Anyways …a few days ago i returned from  a brief sojourn in East Africa. 

I had a fun time in Uganda and Kenya attending G-Uganda and G-Kenya. Its always great and eye opening hanging out with software developers, especially when those developers are from other parts of our great continent.

First off let me say that East Africa is a great place to visit. From the landscape and wildlife to the people. If you are single and need a place where you can run away to have a good time on vacation (responsibly of course) , you should consider East Africa, If you are newly wed and need a place for that romantic honeymoon, you should also consider East Africa. If you have been married for like 10-15 years and are looking for a place for that second honeymoon to rekindle all rekindle-ables….again include East Africa in your plans. A note of warning to my friends from West Africa. If you ever intend to visit East Africa, either you pack your own personal stash of pepper from home, or you remember these two words : "green chilli"  and repeat them several times to the waiter whenever you order food (for some reason pepper is not a standard part of east african cuisine). The life you save may be your own.

Personally i had a number of take aways from my interaction with attendees who came for the programs in both countries. I guess it confirmed to me that Sub Saharan Africa has a lot in common in terms of people who have an interest in technology.

…a small software company

I remember a phrase that kept on reoccurring when i visited India several times in between 2008 and 2010. 

Whats that phrase you may ask?

The phrase is the same as the title of this post: 

"…a small software company"

First Post and ....and...a little more

My people.
Welcome to my neck of the woods.....recently carved out as you can see.
This article is my own way of testing to see if the "Publish Post" button on blogger really works and if you are reading this then i guess it does.
I really do hope that i have the discipline going forward to keep this blog as interesting and as lively as I have always hoped it would be.
The intention is that this blog will chronicle my experiences as I embark on a quest (yes, thats right ...quest) to ensure that the internet becomes part of the everyday lives of people in this part of the world (Africa) by interacting and collaborating with the people who shoulder a large chunk of the responsibility for making it work (software engineers, IT entrepreneurs and you).
It promises to be an interesting experience and while not even i can tell you how it will end (if at all it will end), I can tell you that one of the goals of this quest will be to bring the Geek to the front page of the national newspapers in countries across Africa for all the right reasons.
So who is the Geek you might ask?
Well...