Look, I should warn you already, I am not your tech genius who soaks code like a sponge and zooms through code material to come up with amazing UI/UXs and sexy lines of code at the back wearing short skirts on stilettos. No, I am an ambitious guy who thinks I can make it as a programmer. By the way, what's with Indians and being sharp and having everybody in the tech world lining up to suck their cock? Twitter is now headed by an Indian who I think is the coolest dude I have ever seen. You see, I am really supposed to suck at coding because that is what I have always been led to believe. I first encountered programming in college where a lecturer who has never written one line of functional code in his life thought I deserved a C in C++ programming because I couldn't start my codes with #include . At the time, all I could think was, "What in the actual hell is iostream anyway?" Iostream sounds like music made from eight successive yawns.
I grew to hate that guy and all that he represented, including C++ and programming in general. Then I learnt earlier this year that Facebook was created primarily using PHP! Damn, Mark! I still can't say that I particularly love coding and get butterflies each time I come across lines and lines of sexy code. No, but I think tech is the future of Africa and African children should be taught how to code and how to rely on technology to solve its problems. Yes, we have mad witchcraft as backup just in case tech takes too long to pan out. We were the firs to create Facetime on bowls of water. True story. Before Zoom and her cousins, our ancestors could see your enemy washing his ass at the river through a medium of still crystal-clear water in a copper basin. All you were required to do to blow out his wick was to cut across the surface of the water with a dirty razor blade and Mufasa would suddenly leap out of the bush and tear his useless piece of ass to shreds. Top notch ML and Robotics if you ask me. Happens all the time too.
However, the basin witches are almost all wiped out by age and disease they curiously couldn't cure and the era of witches is gone. Coding is easier now than summoning genies, and African children must be taught that the future is as fat as a Python.
So, I pushed myself over the edge of fear of code and launched on a journey of learning HTML and CSS. Looking forward to beginning real programming with Javascript.
This space is not so much about programming or coding as much as it is about stories of what tech can do and is doing in the African continent. I believe there are countless stories that exist outside of the buzz around unicorns like Mpesa and Twiga in Kenya, Slydepay and Zeepay in Ghana and Flutterwave and Andela in Nigeria. There are smaller startups that are doing the most in obscure spaces and it is the duty of this blog to put the spotlight on these techs and bring them to the fore of your pages. So, in this space, I will be highlighting stories about how tech is changing my country, Kenya and the entire African content. Then, when I am free, I will regale you with how awesomely my own tech projects in Github are slowly turning into one big ball of clusterfuckery. Follow me. I promise you, I am more interesting than you imagine. Innit?