hgh

I've been hoping for a while that github and similar would parse source files and allow me to hop through to definitions and other usage for tokens throughout a repo. I'm not yet convinced I need a cloud IDE, but this would be a nice step in the right direction.

Hi there, I work for a mobile payments company called Zoona (check us out at http://www.ilovezoona.com). Our tech team is based in Cape Town but all of our actual operations are in Zambia, Malawi and expanding to a few more countries soon. Getting some help on the dev would be awesome, and I'd be happy to chat more about what might make sense.

Feel free to get in touch and we can see if something makes sense - hans@ilovezoona.com.

(Same goes for anyone else reading this! Depending on your interests, may be able to link you to a few other projects doing some interesting stuff)

".... and you "just check in" or promise to be available if anything comes up. You respond to just one email or just one GitHub issue."

When people need to be "available" while on vacation it usually means that there is way too much dependency on that person or insufficient knowledge-sharing. It shows the glaring holes on what's being hacked together and where systems can strengthen.

I'm a hiring manager and it's a surprisingly rare but strong signal that someone has a record of contributions or portfolio, especially given how low the barrier to entry is. It's practically an automatic interview given the CVs I've seen and hire if you can talk intelligently and engagingly about what you've worked on.

I recently took the plunge and started biking to work semi-regularly as well. Here's a few points that got me going.

Sweat. If you have a shower at work then great. If not there's no reason to go full tilt on the way to work. Relax, go at a reasonable pace to avoid working up a major sweat. We have a shower at the office, but I rarely use it because it's not too hectic of a ride.

Store stuff at work. Drive into work on a Monday and bring clothes and stuff with you and store in a locker or somewhere at work. Then bike the rest of the days and drive home later in the week.

If you can leave your laptop at work the odd day.. you'll enjoy life at home that much more :)

I tried to hack on g++ as part of project years ago, but really struggled to make any contribution. The codebase is indeed monstrously complex, but the core development team is also very protective. A secondary effect of the growing complexity in an open source project is the decreasing willingness for the core team to bring in new people because of the time/effort cost involved and potential risks. If the team naturally atrophies over time, you end up with increasing stagnation.

Especially in teams, one thing I've found that helps in documentation is standards and templates. If everyone knows exactly what to document, how to document it, and where the documentation lives then it's much more likely to get done and done well.

Start with a minimal set of standards and templates and build up, rather than over-engineering and not getting anything done.

Ungated version: https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi....

Evidence points to keep at it

What the article misses, though a few commenters pick it up, is that this discounting is also a form of price discrimination to maximize profits. The institution will charge each customer based on their willingness (ability) to pay. The schools are actually in a great position to do this because of the fine granularity of the grant amounts and the willingness of their customers to divulge their willingness to pay.

A counterbalance to this though is that bright students are as much the product as they are the customers, especially in elite schools, where building up networks is a key driver of demand.

Two points, one on the project you mention and one on the article..

I worked on the Colalife project in Zambia via Zoona, a mobile payments company, and it's worth understanding how distribution of the product actually evolved.

Coke has enormous distribution into the farthest reaches of rural Zambia because there is enormous demand for the product, which Coke has achieved by its excellent marketing and a smart distribution model.

The Colalife project did great, entrepreneurial work to identify an issue and get a new medical product on the market, but it quickly found that distribution didn't happen by putting the product in coke crates as intended. When demand for oral rehydration salts/zinc increased, traditional distribution mechanisms took over -- boxes of the product making their way on trucks, bicycles, etc. There are things we can learn from Coke's marketing to help design solutions to social issues, but that's not the same as the consumer product itself contributing.

The article makes a good point that caring != ability to create something that produces social impact, but seems to miss the most important part: engaging with and actually understanding your customers, regardless of who they are. Caring itself is not a problem, it's that people conflate those good intentions with understanding, and since they care that is enough to push forward with an idea.

The missing principle, which is as true for affluent as well as disadvantaged customers, is to really engage with, understand and get feedback from your target market.

ZAR caught my attention as well. I'm an expat in SA, based in Cape Town. Feel free to get in touch - hans@zoona.co.za

Zoona (http://www.zoona.co.za) - Cape Town, South Africa

Zoona is a mobile payments company focused on helping small and medium businesses in Africa grow. We provide a payments platform, innovative financing, and data analytics to help people start mobile payment outlets and connect micro and small businesses to their suppliers and customers.

In 2012 Zoona closed a $4m Series A venture capital round led by Omidyar Network and Accion, and we've grown to process millions of dollars in payment value each month.

We're in a very exciting growth phase and looking for:

- Java Developers

- PHP Developers

- UI/UX Designers

- Data Scientists

If you're interested, I'm happy to chat more about the opportunities and the company: hans@zoona.co.za

Zoona (http://www.zoona.co.za)

Cape Town, South Africa

Zoona is a mobile payments company with a passion for helping businesses grow in Africa. In countries like Zambia (Zoona’s core market), businesses of all sizes struggle to grow because of challenges transacting in cash, low access to affordable finance and poor and unreliable data. We provide a payments platform, innovative financing, and data analytics to help people start mobile payment outlets and connect micro and small businesses to their suppliers.

In 2012 Zoona closed a $4m Series A venture capital round led by Omidyar Network and Accion. Zoona has grown to process millions of dollars in payment value each month in pursuit of its vision of Cashless Growing Businesses.

We're in a very exciting growth phase and looking for:

- Java Developers

- PHP Developers

- UI/UX Designers

- Data Scientists

If you're interested, I'm happy to chat more about the opportunities and the company: hans@zoona.co.za

Checking my profile beforehand might have helped :)

Feel free to get in touch - hans@zoona.co.za

Hi, send me an email on hans@zoona.co.za. I'm a Canadian working in Africa, so would be great to chat

Got a few interesting nibbles after posting on the who's hiring posts, but specific hiring submission didn't get far. We're based in Cape Town, so perhaps reader geography plays some part.

If you're in our part of the world, have skills in frontend development, java, or python, and you want to work at a fast growing mobile payments company, send me a mail (email on profile)

Perhaps the name is based off the R language (which came from S), a major data/stats language. Data representation comes before analysis, hence Q?

Renaming marshaling, couldn't tell you.

Zoona (http://www.zoona.co.za)

Cape Town, South Africa

Zoona is an African payments business with a passion for helping businesses grow by enabling “Easy Quick Safe” payments between Corporate Suppliers and Micro & Small Enterprises (MSE’s). In countries like Zambia (Zoona’s core market), businesses of all sizes struggle to grow because of challenges transacting in cash, low access to affordable finance and poor and unreliable data. By combining a set of affordable and accessible working capital finance products with a real-time, electronic payments platform, Zoona addresses real business problems with real business solutions.

In 2012 Zoona closed a $4m Series A venture capital round led by Omidyar Network and Accion, marking the first venture capital deal in a Zambia-based start-up, technology company. Zoona has grown to process millions of dollars in payment value each month in pursuit of its vision of Cashless Growing Businesses.

We're in a very exciting growth phase and looking for:

- Java Developers

- PHP Developers

- UI/UX Designers

- Data Scientists

If you're interested, I'm happy to chat more about the opportunities and the company: hans@zoona.co.za

I find it pretty interesting that email isn't even an option in that list.

I had a similar experience, small plane over a relatively hilly area in Zambia. It took me a bit to get past the assumption that the vibrating around my leg wasn't a structural problem with plane....

I've spent some time in the economics field and certainly found that getting access to quality data was an enormous challenge. In fact a good amount of the work is spent putting together data sets. This is probably the bulk of what econ grad students do.

Besides this, it's important to recognize the difference between identifying correlations and patterns in data vs understanding the mechanisms behind the phenomena. Krugman makes a strong point: "The problem is that there is no alternative to models. We all think in simplified models, all the time. The sophisticated thing to do is not to pretend to stop, but to be self-conscious -- to be aware that your models are maps rather than reality." [1]

Data-mining will help generate and support hypotheses, but this is complementary to model building.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/dishpan.html

Perhaps referring to a theory about glaciers over a continent melting and essentially "raking" the soil to create a relatively robust and even quality, which didn't happen so much in Africa as other places.

Zambia was a relatively wealthy place in Africa around independence, but the economy relied almost exclusively on copper, which is one of the most volatile commodities around. The pseudo-socialist government led by Kaunda helped unify the country but also drove the economy into the ground by providing massive subsidies all around and failing to create institutions to support long-term growth. The economy declined massively through 70s and 80s. Impending bankruptcy and structural adjustment programmes forced the government to pull back support, and then people protested and rioted to bring down the government and introduce multi-party democracy. The rebuilding process has been continuing (the first democratic handover of power happened a few years ago) and copper prices have been great, led by incredible demand from China.

The politics isn't perfect and economic diversification from mining is still only in it's infancy, but the trends are pointing in the right direction.

True, but pretty much a tautology.

Zambia has been growing at 6+ % for 6-7 years, raised a massively oversubscribed bond issuance to invest in infrastructure, and a Transparency International corruption perception index score just shy of Italy's.

All of the things you mention are relevant, but things are changing more quickly than you would expect.

The 4% difference compounds reasonably well.

Suppose you start at $80k and work at the company for 5 years. After five years the strict 8-5 eng in your example is making $87k--barely keeping up with inflation--and the hard worker is making $101k. The total compensation difference over 5 years is $35k.

Unfortunately, real world compensation schemes often don't even work out as well as your example...

True - often "full stack developer" is synonymous with dilettante

I wonder how much is cause and how much is effect. One of the reasons that we have the suburbs is everyone owning cheap cars and getting cheap petrol. Not to discount good urban design and public infrastructure, but if there are autonomous cars, I suspect there will be corresponding influence on urban planning. Likely for the better.

Esoko http://www.esoko.com/ is a good example. I've seen these in action in various places and I've been skeptical about how much value they actually bring to the table. Price information actually disperses pretty quickly, and for most commodities prices aren't that volatile. In the markets where wholesalers sell vegetables, you see people getting screwed by the middlemen, but basically it's because these middlemen control the marketplace, not because of lack of information.

Mostly regular phones (nokia 1200s are ubiquitous) but especially in places like Kenya, smartphone penetration is beginning to increase quickly. SMS and USSD are generally most useful. WAP can be used, but penetration of WAP enabled phones is much lower. One thing that works at times when a WAP interface is required is to follow some sort of "kiosk" model where someone who has a WAP-enabled phone provides services for others without.

Certainly the right meetup over coffee would digress into laptops out battling over technical ideas and implementations or reading through some samples?