On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Murigi Muraya
<mmskunkworks@gmail.com> wrote:
Many of us Africans have a major inferiority complex. How does it manifest? In thinking and treating non African individuals, organizations and enterprises better than we do our own.
Can you imagine someone who grew up hearing nothing good about Africa thinking an African is worth it? They even wonder why the African is trying to impress them so hard when they can tell that African cannot even do anything good for their fellow African. You yuppies, out there, do not let down Kenya like many of us already have. This is your country so Build it Up!
@Murigi, I'm sure you know the industry better than many and so share certain views but let us avoid looking down at ourselves. I think the main problem is lack of general direction and I'm convinced that this is something that can be changed over time. Your efforts to highlight the issues are well appreciated and key too. Things cannot change overnight but as many know events such as Bar Camp/DevCon bring together developers and others. Events are quite important to the Kenyan tech calendar, I hope there will be progress towards the 2 next year.
Moving on, I think there others who may consider mine or your contributes to threads as Dev bashing or offensive and to be fair to them, they did not create the problems. To me the problems go back to learning centres etc which are responsible for the production line errors.
I spent sometime researching Kenyan Devs who are online and the feedback I got back from the results is quite confusing. For some reason, SMS based programming seems to be driving programmers. As an example, I followed Jessica ( Strathmore ) contributes and also found it surprising that recently the Elephant foundation used SMS based technology to track an elephant. This technology was not developed locally so kind of confusing what really is going on. There is much emphasis on SMS based apps. In short, those in the industry need to start sharing the skills in demand over say eg a 3 year period. The Govt and private sector need to do projections of what the market needs. Is it C sharp, java, php, sql etc skills that are in short supply? Without these, there can be no basis on what the future of Kenyan software industry can do and everyone can continue with whatever the market trends are. And we are back to the assembly line. The SMS programming apps industry grew from what stats? Why is there focus on it? And now the focus is on payment gateways, so again market driven. Direction is being driven by short term gains and the dream and pressure to capture, dominate the market. No one to blame for this, look at Safcom and the computer industry. Market leaders are setting monopolistic trends, those trends will rub off down the line as it becomes survival.
Its a very complicated subject but I hope small gains made by everyone's efforts will go in the right direction. :-)
Rgds.