39
GiddyNaya
72d

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

Comments
  • 3
    I’m curious about point 1

    How slow is slow?
  • 6
    @Lensflare On average speed you can spend the whole day downloading a file of 10GB. It gets even worse on bad weather.
  • 3
    @GiddyNaya ok that’s really slow. My speed in Germany is a bit better but not much.
  • 5
    Thanks for sharing your story ♥️
  • 4
    One day for 10 gb is not that bad, even in my country, it probably needs at least 4 hours. 10 gb file is huge.
  • 3
    @daniel-wu in India it would take half an hour to download a 10 GB file.
  • 2
    Mathematically I am supposed to take round about 85 seconds to download that... But on the other hand, with TCP congestion control and all, it will be more like 3 minutes, so I guess I have good reason to complain, too.

    But seriously, worked a job once, back when I had bad internet. It was for a shopping platform. And they had like 400GB of images. And before those weren't downloaded, it didn't look right... And the damn shopping platform was constantly creating new images, so I couldn't mount them. It would have taken more than a day to download them, not to even speak that I didn't have enough space. And the deadline was less than a day.

    Lucky me, they had terabytes of free space on their server. I created a copy of the images and mounted it via sshfs. With that I could work.

    Also I downloaded a copy of it to an external hard drive in the background. So on the third day I could work offline on it.
  • 0
    @GiddyNaya What country are you in because in terms of job opportunities, my country is much worse for developers unless you plan to leave
    Most of the stuff built here are not by Ghanaians, they would hire outsiders and give them free reign on what and how to build without giving any proper documentation or user manual
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