GitHub Community, 16 Nov 2021

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From YouTube: GitHub Africa Virtual Event

Description

- GitHub Universe News with Martins and Ruth 📺
- Mr. Abdul Qudusabubakre - Web Optimization: More than an afterthought
- Ms. Tsitsi Primrose Marote - Cofounding a startup

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Hello rule hello.

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D

Yeah, it's good, it's good to have you guys back. um We took a little break from our universe event last month, so um we are really excited to have you guys here for at the november meetup. This is. I think this is the last meetup for the year yeah.

E

So we're having another one, because you know the holidays.

D

Yeah yeah, we need, we need to go, take a break, and you know yeah here kill some uh slice of or slaughter some uh some uh chicken for the for the new year.

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D

Christmas myself, uh thank you guys for joining us today. uh We have uh a lot of uh goodies packed for you guys today.

E

A lot of news as well: oh yeah,.

D

There's a lot of from from universe right, there's a a lot of uh you know new offerings and you know new functionality on the platform, so really pretty excited here to to um be chatting with you. So um ruth do you? Oh yeah, I'm first here, so um you guys are ready.

D

Yeah yeah, um I'm an accountant's activity here at github in here for almost four years. um You know I'm also a crypto enthusiast. uh I invest a little bit in real estate here and there um ruth introduce yourself.

E

Sure so hi everybody welcome back again, um so my name is ruth kagame from nigeria and I'm technical content manager at a company called animals um also a key top star, and I love contributing to open source. uh You can find me at kegarus at uh on twitter, so yeah I'm excited to host this event. Along with martin and, like martin said, we have like a lot for you today. A lot of news interesting. You know interesting conversations and interesting talks as well. So yeah, that's about me.

D

Cool- and um you know this is our agenda for today um we have two speakers. uh The first is mr abdul um he'll, be talking about optimization, for you know, whatever projects you guys are working on, and then we also have a co-founder um of a startup, and her name is mrs titsy. um She will be talking about. You know I I I have.

D

I do have have some specific questions that I want to ask you, because I have some more startup ideas that I want to work on, uh while I'm in nigeria so definitely uh make sure you stay uh through to the uh towards the end. For for that uh conversation.

D

And I think the the last part will have a closing section and a networking uh time on zoom. So um please stay till the end. You also have more time with the speakers to ask them questions I wouldn't go through um during their presentation or their talk, so definitely um still uh to the to the end for the networking session.

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E

And you always forget about cahoots games, there's also going to be cargo to give.

E

Yeah, maybe because you've not played it before yeah yeah, there's also going to be like car hoods games during. You know that networking session, where we um play games- and you know you can win something yeah. I think uh martin's. Your screen is okay back, okay, back all right, so talking session.

A

D

And um for a bit of news, we have a few things for you guys uh today. um Ruth do you want to take.

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The first one sorry like we said we have like a lot of things from you know the universe. If you did not, you know, watch the universe. You can still catch up with it. um So for the first thing we have um so issues is now better. So github issues has like a new experience and which is in public better. So with issues now you can do project planning just the way. You know you have to your apple hair on a small scale. Where you can. You know, break issues like into tax.

E

You know you can track relationships. You can also have like conversations, and you know you can automate everything with code and you know everything issues now has like a very good experience where you know you don't have issues all over the place, but you can. You know us bring them into like different tags, and you know tag them very um organized and organized manner. So um you should also check that out. It's expands to public beta use, so you should check that out.

D

Yeah, um that's definitely a key one of the major um announcements from you know from gear of the universe, so definitely check that out and one other enhancement we made to uh you know using workflows on on the gita platform is what some people call um impute types for you know manual workflows.

D

So, specifically um now you can define um you know, you know the inputs you want to. You know, have in your workflow, um you can you know in addition to like default string types you can now. um You know have things like you know: a choice, boolean and environment definitions in your uh your manual workflow. So that's that's something that customers and you know, people on your open source community we're asking about so now you can, you can further define- and you know, customize your amount of workflows and yeah perfect.

E

So um guitar has you know the command palette. It's like really really very interesting, because it's just like keyboard keyboard um shortcuts. Where you can. I also try this out earlier on, where you can just you know, search up different things within an organization and you can explore different stuff. So I think I know for the um for mac versioning marketing for windows.

E

Sorry, but if you're using imac just command k and you can search up like different things, you know between that organization, issues, concord or issues with the hashtag um hash issues, and you know all of that things like different keywords, so you can explore that um on github, it's not available for you. Your github makes everything easier for you so yeah. So a command palette is not available for everyone.

D

Yeah and I think for windows is like control k, but definitely go check out github.com and to to figure out. I would check before uh this end of this presentation, I'll put a link to like all the uh have documents for command palette.

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D

And also for github code scanning uh github advanced security products, which is you know, free for open source. We now have ruby support, so um github is committed to to further expand all the languages that we support.

D

uh For you know you know security as far as application security is concerned, so stay tuned, for you know more announcements, more languages that would support down the road. So if you're a ruby developer, good news now you can scan um you know, for you know, vulnerabilities within your code as you actually work on your open source, or you know private uh projects.

E

Yeah, that's nice.

D

Yeah, that's it's pretty cool also looks like this. Is me too. um We shipped for uh universe uh for our enterprise. You know, if you, if you, if your company uses github enterprise, you can now have custom repository roles right. So this is something that you know. People were asking for on the data platform, so you cannot define uh someone as a security engineer.

D

He just um his job is to like maintain security pipeline and make sure that you know your code is clean and all of that and then you can also designate someone as a contractor, a community manager with only read access. So there's a lot you can do as far as like all the roles within within your github organization is concerned, and you know this is something that our enterprise customers can enjoy and even I think for the rest of the other custom role.

D

Like security engineer, contractor community manager, I think that's available for every other um tier of, like uh github, um in a plan, so definitely check that out um I'll also go after I hand over to it I'll look for the link to this as well and post it and post on youtube.

E

Nice so um good news, another good news, so co-pilot's not very good for all these ideas, like jets, brains, um fame, you know um pycharm as well, so you can now use copilot on all these other ideas, no longer like vs code and the other one. So it's not available for so the id. So please do check it out and explore with keto co-pilot.

A

Awesome, thank you ruth. Let's see this is your stuff also.

E

um You know um with github code spaces, there has been um some good improvements where you can. You know, try out, um you know future composition, the bit of cli and also like um rest api as well. So um I think um github code space is still in beta right and it's not available to everyone. So it's currently available like team- and you know, enterprise cloud plans, so you can check that out. If you are, if you have access to github code spaces- and I also wish it's going to go- live to everyone soon,.

D

Awesome, thank you and another universe. Update. Let's see if we haven't had enough universe updates.

D

So these there's been some um work on github discussion, so get up. Discussion is a place where you can ask questions around a specific git up topic, and uh so we've made some integrations and- uh and you know, added some enhancements.

D

So specifically, if you, if you are not aware, github discussions uh was launched last year um to help developers and teams and open source communities um to get ideas, collaborate and communicate effectively.

D

So we got a lot of feedback. You know as to like how to improve our discussions and make it more uh powerful, and you know rich with features, and uh one of the things we heard was to like um integrate a git of actions. Support, um for instance, you can, you can trigger actions, walk through and give up discussions, and um also like um you do workbook events right.

D

Another thing that people asked for was to like have discussion later, so you can like um probably um properly categorize different discussions, and you know you know, filter based on like specific labels, and all of that, so you can have custom labels. You can write your own labels and, just um you know, organize things on discussion, and the last thing was to integrate um discussions on github mobile so that you can continue to, like you know, um have the discussions on the go.

D

So um it's now also on github mobile. So those are some of the enhancements we made on discussions go check it out. uh It's obviously free for open source, so uh go check that out. Thank you um and also um github. Has uh we started um uh actions hackathon if you are not familiar, git of actions is our ci cd and automation platform.

D

So this is the second year in in the in in us hosting github actions hackathon. So um from october, sorry, from december, 8th github is offering um an immersive opportunity for you to utilize github actions to benefit open source and there'll, be lots of prices uh to go with. You know your projects and all participants will need to share a dev post detailing how uh they create um their amazing workflow git of action.

D

So um if you don't also know, we have a marketplace where you can check out all the github actions that have been created in the past, so we'll be curious to see what um people will create during this hackathon. Remember it's december 8th so just next month, here uh less than a month away, and also um we also had oktoberfest last month, which was like it's october and um we wanted to emphasize github actions.

D

um I profit open source access point. So, if you're looking, um if you're, trying to figure out like what open source work or project um you want to, like you know, add to your resume. Github actions is a great way to like go start, creating apps and applications on top of the the platform, and you know put yourself out there. um Let me just list some of the prices um that will that would be uh won during the hackathon.

D

So there'll be five grand winners and um in each category right, so there will be um 1500 us dollars, gift cards or equivalents. So I think that's for, like five people and then it'll be 300 usd credit for uh depth shop. The github, swags there'll be devs sticker packs.

D

uh There's there's a lot of there's a lot of prizes here, so you guys need to like go to like github news or get a blog and learn more about, like um the actions happen like there's just so many prizes here, like it's gonna, take the whole date for me to like read through all the prices um and, let's see here. So if you want to submit a project for the hackathon, you can follow these steps. um I would look for the link to this and have it sent on on youtube.

D

So uh that's just a little bit more uh also there we have a. um I think this is a twitter community that you can join um as well, so you can learn more about uh what's going on as far as github is concerned, and the deaf community and some of the things we are doing um around the actions hackathon so uh definitely go. Follow um us at get a community to to join and you'll get all the other news you won't have to hear from me.

D

You can get it straight from the developers that are working on this actions uh hackathon. So I think that's pretty much. It.

E

Yeah, um well, that's all the news that we have, but if you would like to be a speaker if you're listening, you like to be a speaker or you have someone that will be interested in speaking at you know: github africa, virtual events, please um go use that link and you know, submit um your proposals um and then go go to it and do out contact you. So um we accept us because please do fill in the proposals and let us know that you want to speak and then you also be up here.

E

You know speaking and educating others so yeah. So please submit your proposals and I think it's time for us to hear our awesome speakers.

D

All right, so um let me introduce the first speaker. um Abdul um abubakar is the first speaker he's you know in nigerian. um He wants he'll be talking about web optimization. uh You know, it's really important. So definitely stay and listen to all uh his presentation and he will be available on zoom after uh the meetup. So we can talk more so abubakar over to you.

C

Okay, um hello, everyone um yeah, so glad to be here. uh My name is alvin kudus. I am a front-end developer at satisfaction.

F

Today, we'll be looking at web optimization more than an after thought, so web optimization is actually a very important aspect.

C

So yeah all right.

F

um Moving on uh what is web optimization um put simply it's the process of using tools, techniques, some strategies, basically steps you take to make sure the overall performance of your application is, is optimized right. There are several techniques that you can take. um All of those processes put together can be described as optimization.

F

um So why should you really care about optimization right? I mean you you're done building your website, you've written your html, your students, your javascript, you deployed it and you know: should you really care about optimizing it? It works. Fine, um you've tested it. There are no issues. So why should you care about optimizing, your application? um The first one is you you, you get um an improved user experience right, um so people come to your website and they're able to do yourself fast. They.

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Don't have to wait.

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31 minutes 10 seconds one minute for your application to come up. You can easily view your site do what you want to do and leave another. One is customer retention, which is also very important from the business aspect of things you want to make sure people come into your site. Don't just go and not come back again.

F

Typical example is when you're building um a food delivery system- and you want people to order food- someone that's very hungry, comes to your website tries to order something to eat. But then it takes 30 seconds up to a minute for your side to come up and then someone is very hungry doesn't have as much patience as you'd expect, so they leave your sights. I would probably not come back again because the last time you were hungry, you were able to order something uh on your site.

F

The other reason why you should care about optimism is the fact that it gives you this competitive edge about that business, which is very important because when you're, a business you're probably competing with other people, other businesses, you are trying to make sure you have that edge. No matter how little um so having a website downloads fast is gives your business an edge right so take.

F

For example, you have an e-commerce platform you're competing with people, businesses like amazon aliexpress, and you want to make sure people come to your site, unable to use it so having a fast website gives you that edge and allows people to use your application properly.

F

um So optimizing. Your website um is something that should be done during development. Yeah things. You should consider things you should be conscious about when you're building and when you don't take distance into concentration and eventually do them after you're done developing. There are some issues that you might face, and one is it's almost always too late to optimize after you're developing um when you realize oh, the performance on my site is quite poor. I have to optimize this at that point. It's almost too late.

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You probably have had users that experience um poor performance on your side. I wouldn't.

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Come back, you've lost some users, you've probably lost a lot of money. Also. um Another thing is it's relatively expensive because at the point where you realize well, I have to optimize this. You already don't do you've already done developing to production and you might want to begin thinking of hiring a performance expert to help you optimize your application now. This will involve another hiring process to spend more money, and it's also almost.

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To modify thousands of lines of code, so you don't develop them and you probably have several lines of javascript css html, and then you begin to wonder. Where do I start from at that point? It's almost too late to optimize, um so we'll be looking at ways you.

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Improve your performance things you can take into consideration when building your site, as it would help you to have an overall improved performance and things, and you won't have to go back to optimizing after you're done developing.

F

um So some of the tips to improve performance during development we'll be talking about three or four, um the first one and it's one I try to talk a lot about is using.

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F

For the way, absolutely necessary, I mean a lot of times. You know with the um coming together of uh package managers, you have things like npm, especially npm. It's usually very easy for people to go to npm, look for a certain library that does what they want to do and all they do is install it. Don't really check much, I mean it works, so why should I really check whether this library is optimized or not? Well, one thing is um these libraries are the increase to the overall quantum size of your application?

F

um So if your website was about 30, 40 kilobytes before you install this library, maybe after installing all of these libraries, the bundle says yes, two megabytes one megabyte um a typical example um and I've seen a lot in websites is when you use libraries like moment or no dash, um people just tend to install the whole thing when probably the future they needed for is something that they could have done um without having to install this libraries.

F

Another thing to consider is this: libraries might not exactly be maintained at that point, maybe the last time it was updated about several months ago. Now the problem with that is, there might be some techniques, some ways to optimize your website. That was being that that was being um uh that came about you know before. After the time the library was updated that that library might not be using. So if you have things like tree shaking several optimization techniques, this libraries might not support that.

F

So that means any optimization technique you even want to use would not be supported by this library, so you won't be able to optimize these libraries now moving on the next one is to compress media files as much as possible.

F

If you see the image to the right, you realize media files and javascript takes off a lot of the space on your web application. You have video taken up to 60 percent image is taking 21 percent and javascript taken for 10.

F

Now one thing you want to do is you want to make sure you compress this media file as much as possible, because it's going to take a lot of time for your site to load up all of these videos or these images, and that time is going to be added to the overall waiting time.

F

So if you had about three four videos, for example on your site, the user is going to have to wait for all of these videos to load up before they can use your application and what, if they don't want to watch this video. If this video is not even on that particular page they're coming to see right, you're just trying to do the video that they won't end up seeing yeah. Another thing is to use optimized image formats like webp.

F

So um web is a new image format that allows you to compress your images, but not losing um so much quality. So you could take an image. That's up to 500 kilobytes, bring it down to about 50, probably 20 kilobyte dependent and you you won't lose as much um quality. It's called lossless compression right. um Another technique. You could consider is to this is due to these images, so there are times when you're building applications that relies heavily on some of these images right.

F

Take, for example, you're trying to build a good gallery website, and obviously you want people to see some of the images you have in your gallery and copy up to 100 pictures. So you can't just load up all of these images at once right. You have to look for techniques, ways to optimize where you load this images, and one way to do that is to lazy load. These images right. You have 100 images on your site. Obviously the user won't see all of these 100 images at once.

F

So the way this loading works is you only show the user what they see at a certain time. So if probably the screen can only show about six pictures at a time what you're going to do is you show those six pictures and then, as user scrolls, you load the next six. Then your next six keep on doing that. So that way, the user doesn't know the hundred pictures that once more, they need to know.

F

There's six images for them to start viewing your website and as they keep on scrolling, they can um keep viewing um more of these images, and one other thing I need to add is: do you really need an image on your site? um There are times when these things you're using an image for, can be done with something like an icon or um probably even css, but then you added an image, that's several kilobytes, large and then and I'll go over here to your application.

F

Another thing we're also going to consider is how to optimize um the javascript file. Now. This is also very important because javascript files, we almost cannot do without javascript on the front end and usually javascript takes quite a lot of space and we need to find ways to optimize these files and one way to do that is to remove unused code using three shaking.

F

So the way three checking works is if you have, um for example, a library that yeah I'm going to use blue dash again, for example, so you have load dashboard gives you several functions right and maybe what you just wanted to import. You put it just one or two functions from blue dash and then low dash has several hundred functions and you're just using two. If you don't use three shaking with low dash, that would mean you are adding 98 more of these functions that you're not using to your um bundle size.

F

So what tree shaking does is it picks those two functions that you use right and discards, the other 98, so just those two are what's going to be added to your bundle, says and that's how tree shaking works. um So you want to make sure you are removing all of this unused code now, usually with tools like web pack. That's almost done automatically with um es5 import and exports. You will have to um you know manually. Do the three shaking yourself.

F

You have tools that does that, for you, um another thing to consider is to cache your gs files. Now you don't want the.

B

F

Always reach out to the server to get your js files, except there is like an updated, javascript files. What you want to do is, if you have your javascript files made at once. You try to cache them on your browser, such that anytime user wants to access the javascript files again, they won't have to reach out to the server.

F

They can just check the cache get javascript files, and if there are any updates, um you can get that, while users, when you're doing what they want to do on your page, um another technique is called splitting. So you have this huge javascript file, but then you realize not everything is being used on your landing page. For example, maybe you only needed one or two lines of javascript code from um that parts that has been used on your landing page, so you won't want to load up the entire javascript file when using the landing page.

F

It's like saying hey. I want you to know something: you're not going to use now, but I'll show you you're going to use the town right. What are the chances that the user is going to get to that particular page where they are going to use that javascript functions? So what you want to do is try to make sure you're delivering only the part that have been used, the essential components, basically. um So, if you're on the landing page, what you want is a function that toggles the number, for example, only load. That section.

F

So what you want to do uh is load these files um asynchronously right, so you have probably the index.js, for example, the one that has been used on the index page. That's where you load, when user comes to your landing page and then, when that's been loaded and user is navigating your website successfully.

F

um You know you could begin loading, the login page or the sign up page without having to disrupt the user's interaction with your site. Basically, another technique is to minify all your javascript files right. So minification basically involves you having you, have your javascript file, so you're trying to remove all of the spaces all of the unused code. Basically your comments, and all of that, so that's been done with tools like opelify, so that's been done by. um They have tools.

F

That does that, basically, you don't have to begin removing spaces, usually as human beings, we try to use codes that are readable right, so you have tools that help you to find the javascript files and they reduce you at all size right. So you would have to push 500 kilobytes of javascript files when you could push about 250.

F

So well we're looking for ways to reduce the size, so anything that we can do we try to do it. um There's also. This pattern called push and preload, so you only push in um the required files and for um the ones that are not needed. You try to do them after that. So these are several techniques that you could take to improve your your javascript files.

F

um There are so many and if you decide to um go to all of them now probably won't leave here today, um so moving on, there are tools to help you measure the performance of your site. So how do you know whether your site is fast? How you know areas you can improve, um so some of these stores are lighthouse- and that's probably my favorite, so because it gives you this interface on your browser, dev tools where you can easily check um what is not working well on my site.

F

Where do I have to improve um and my image is looking fine? Do I have to um compress my images gives you a very detailed report and it also doesn't involve you leaving maybe your particular screen. You can just open up your dev tools inspect and you see your performance reports. Basically um there also, there was like page speed, page building sites, um web page tests, chrome, ux reports. There are several other tools out there that allow you to measure the performance of your site.

F

um You can just decide to check anyone out and um yeah. So that's it. We have some of the helpful resources. I think one of the most important one is um the web.dev um it's this resource by google. That gives you a lot regarding your performance. You can find um several tools also that can help you to improve your performance. You have the andala.com insights, there's several other ones, but these are some of the ones I could find. So you could take time to check them out and see which works for you.

F

So um thank you very much. I think that's the end of my presentation. So if there are any questions you can just drop them in the comment section.

D

Awesome, thank you so much thanks. So much abdul for that awesome presentation.

D

You want to introduce the next speaker.

E

Okay, I think, there's a question here from cuba. How do you manage particularly question of js files in acid pipeline.

F

Okay um yeah, so there are several ways you could do that I mean for me the way I do do I do crash numbers before they use things like a service worker, so it's basically done on the front-end side of things, um so you won't have to do a lot of work on your csd pipeline. You have service workers that basically cache these javascript files for you. So anytime, you load the javascript files. um You would basically store them into like a service worker.

F

So like a storage basically, and when you need those files again, you don't have to check this out. You just check the service worker demo, um but from the cm, probably the server side of things. I think there are some tools. I think nginx provides some um tools that you could use to cache. Some of these javascript files right on servers hope that answers your question.

A

E

Thank you so much abdul. I don't know if okay yeah so there's a comment. Great talk.

E

A

Yep things like do for your presentation.

E

A

Thank you very much.

E

Yeah, okay, so we have our next people coming up, um so we are going to be hearing from cc. um Ct is a co-founder at you know: guardian healthcare going to learn about the guardian health in a couple of minutes. This secret is going to. You know, tell us about that and she's. Also a data scientist at teraflow, ai and city is going to be talking about co-founding startup, so in case you're interested, you know future um startups or anything. You would really benefit from this session.

E

So um I think it's it's going to be up in minutes.

E

One's going interactive, we're going to you, know, be absent to take up some questions and should turn all the feedback, and then you can also prep your questions as well. To ask okay yeah, I think she's not pop, yet.

D

Yeah also some things about titsy. uh She um she she studied at the wheat's university, um has a bachelor in computation and applied mathematics in big data analytics, which is pretty cool.

D

um Last year she was one of the top 15 geeks of south africa and also part of the rising stars of south africa by brainstorm magazine, so she's really good. um She loves research and the application of technology to solving societal problems.

D

um Guardian heard just a little bit about guardian earth, it's a telehead platform uh co-owned by titsy, uh and he won about five hackathons last year. So this is why it's good for, like you know, um engineers like you, know, go to hackathons and you know put your work out there. You never know um how that would. um You know, help your career or help your ideas and bring it to life.

D

um There's a lot of stuff she's been involved in, uh including like uh the uh uh intelligence, I.t web business, intelligence, hackathon, cabotek life, hackathon, nemisa data science, hackathon she's, been like all over the place, putting her ideas out there, and you know this has helped her gain. Experience meet people that can help her, because I just have atoms you're gonna make meet other engineers, you connect with them and potentially they can become your co-founder so titsy thanks so much for joining us, and we really appreciate your time.

D

So you know uh just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about um guardian heart and how did we get started.

B

Cool well, thank you guys for having me so as you're introduced, um I'm city and um so guardian health started. It wasn't like an idea to start a startup. Actually when it started it was.

B

I was supposed to go back to university to do my master's in computer science, focusing on anomaly detection of maternal health issues, so I just wanted to do a bit of experimentation using a hackathon that was coming up to just see what I could find in some data that I had and just see, if that the topic actually made sense, um did that develop some really cool algorithms, with my partner tino and after we're presented.

B

Actually, it's only then that somebody actually from my government department was quite keen to hear a little bit more because apparently it was a solution that could potentially solve a problem that they were facing and from there onwards I guess he kind of planted a seed um that actually you know this could potentially be a solution that can go further than just a hackathon and we started competing actually building a feature at every hackathon that we went to until later in the year that we actually won the best youth app at the mtn app awards, and this year won the best house app at the mtn app awards.

B

So it's been a journey, but it didn't start as okay we're starting a business. It was actually only at the end of the year that we were like. Oh hey. You know we need to start kind of planning this to actually be an actual startup.

D

Wow, that's awesome very interesting, just a little bit because there's a major company in the u.s, uh it's called twilio, you know getting into communications and like they started from a hackathon as well right. So it's it's! It's great that your companies had its roots from in a hackathon.

E

Nice, so um so I understand that, like we're like you're fully, you know self-funded, so um I think everybody's here for survival tips. So um what what's? What are how? How are you managing with that? You know and all that.

B

um So I think one of the survival tips for us was um through the hackathons. Not only were we developing new features and kind of also gaining exposure, of course networking, but, most importantly, as we were winning those hackathons, we were actually raising money, because you know you get that 50 000 rand and it it means a lot for a startup. So um you make sure that you do what you can, um but also, I guess, most importantly, also taking advantage of some free things that um some tech companies have like.

B

If you look at your amazon, they usually have some deals for startups, and when you look at your gcp, they usually have some deals for startups. I think that's another tip as well that try and also take advantage of any free things that you can possibly get your hands on to start. You know build something because the idea is not you're, probably not going to scale in the first month or so honestly.

B

So the idea is just you just want to be able to have something that you can showcase to other people and the free things are sufficient enough for that. Most of the.

D

Time, really, that's really good advice. um There's a lot of free stuff out there that you can take advantage of as a startup. um Another thing I was curious about it is: how do you approach work that impacts uh the well-being of an entire country? You know you know. Healthcare in in in africa is. I think that we have less doctors per capital like uh in africa compared to any other place in the world.

D

So like um was that something that drove you so to the startup or to the specific um you know, area or industry, to tackle.

B

Yeah, um that's a really great question. So, um as I mentioned, the motivation behind starting guardian house actually started through wanting to do my research in a health related topic. The particular reason why that was important um is actually because in south africa, specifically and there's quite an issue that we actually have where a lot of women prefer to go to um hospitals instead of clinics, even though they could potentially give birth at a clinic.

B

So but essentially you want only high-risk women to go to a hospital, but because, as a woman, you don't know if you're a high risk- or rather you would rather be at a hospital, because there is obviously the assumption that there are more resources, which is true. um But then what usually happens is that it gets hospitals. Quite overloaded and they've been like massive things where there are no beds and genuinely the situations are quite bad. So if we can be able to use data science to detect the risk of a woman one.

B

Obviously we allow that woman to seek help on time, but also we allow the resource planning that that should be happening on the facility level to be much more efficient, and that was really the motivation then going forward. I think the motivation to to develop solutions in health is because, as africa we face a lot of issues and when we adopt some solutions that are not built in africa, they're not built for the african continent, and what generally happens is that you find that they don't address the issues that we face directly.

B

So I would definitely inspire um that, whichever continent you're in try to also tackle the problems that your communities face, because you understand them better. So you can solve more custom solutions for your communities and your society and all that.

E

Interesting good, that's good! So um another question we have is like you know, which you know: um guardian health. You know I'm sure you have experienced. You know some some stuff. You have to like leverage some of your knowledge on it. So what were like the most important entrepreneur, lessons that you can you know share with us and you know the audience that you know we could benefit from feel free to like draw instances where you had like bottlenecks with guardian health and then it's just helped you scale through so yeah.

E

We have to hear that as well.

B

Cool, so I think um so as a technical person as a hundred percent of a technical person, or that was last year. I think my business knowledge has developed quite a bit since then, but I think one of the mistakes that we make as tech people.

B

I don't know if it's a mistake, but a lot of times, if you're trying to solve a problem in a domain that you are not familiar with the problem is you're solving it from a technical perspective, but you don't really have knowledge on whether or not it's actually the right solution for your target audience. So I think one of the lessons that we had to learn later on was when we started to engage with our end users. That's when we were like. Oh damn. This is not a very good it's it.

B

There is definitely a problem we've identified and everybody can agree that we've identified the problem, but perhaps it's not exactly solving the problem that the end user would want you to solve it. So I think one lesson from that would be. You need to start engaging with people that you're solving problems for quite early on in the journey, don't build for a year and then go talk to people that you're building for rather engage quite early on. I think the second thing is actually people are kinder than you think.

B

um I think a lot of times. There's always been this thing that you know you're on your own as an entrepreneur and like you know, you've got to like really swim on your own, and I think my experience has actually been quite different. There was a lot of support.

B

um You know a lot of people reached out, particularly when we, when we were kind of gaining a lot of um you know when people were writing about us, and all that I mean genuinely health professionals reached out to actually want to be a part of our journey, uh which is how we got our health consultant as well, dr snape, and that is just somebody who felt like they wanted to be part of our journey. So one thing shoot your shots. Go on twitter, go on, linkedin, ask for help.

B

If they say no, they say no, but you're not going to lose anything right, but also, I think one other thing is fail quickly right because you don't want to spend too much time um focusing on an idea that might not work, because at the end of the day, as much as some ideas do work, some do not work out right.

B

So you want to build as quickly as you can get feedback as quickly as you can, and if it's something that's not going to work, you can quickly move on so that you don't work on something. That's maybe not going to work out because you didn't seek help or you didn't, seek people's opinions early on so feel quick.

B

If it's an idea, that's not going to work out.

D

Yeah, that's that's really really good. um I had one more question. um You also did a scientist at terraflow. Is that, like your day, job like how do you combine doing that and also like running a startup like it seems like a lot? How do you balance your stuff.

B

So I'm actually not really doing data science work anymore. I'm actually a software discipline lead at the moment. So I'm completely doing software engineering now. But yes, I do have a full-time job in terms of wait. What was the question.

D

How do you, how do you balance your time? Even when someone has it, uh how do you balance your full-time job and running a style by the same time? It's something I'm trying to do so. I want to get your experience.

B

Yeah um it's difficult and I think last year was even harder because then it was like okay. You now suddenly have this new thing. That requires a lot of your time and then um it was. It was quite difficult to manage, but I think now it's more of every day um I try to put in some time, even if it's an hour, even if it's whatever, but at some point at five o'clock I need to put in a few hours. um I generally try to separate my day quite nicely. I have really early mornings.

B

I think that's also another thing I usually start my day at around five latest six and like maybe put in about three hours before I actually start my day job and then also put in maybe an hour or so after work. It's very difficult and also weekends are usually for the startup. So it's difficult, but it's but it's doable, but it's definitely not easy at all.

D

Yeah, I can yeah definitely understand that.

E

D

E

Question here so um there is many startups, have like lots of manual attacks and processes at the beginning in order to ship fast. So how soon should you start using automation.

B

um Honestly speaking, I wouldn't advise perfection in the beginning. I don't think any startup has perfection, you build something so that it works or you can like the bare minimum right. So you can honestly.

B

I think if you take too much time focusing on automation and making something perfect, you're, probably running out of time, somebody could possibly ship it out before you or you yeah momentum, so don't focus on perfection. Focus on just make it work, make it work, make some user to use it. Make them understand that you know you're not like I don't know, you're, not some corporate. That's got this thing and it's perfect make them understand that you've got this thing.

B

This is what it's supposed to do and then they give you feedback, and then you can do everything else that you do because the idea is you want to get as much feedback as you can in the beginning. It's not so much about okay, our back-end processes, it's never perfect in the beginning, and don't even focus on that.

B

So I don't know about the house soon part, but I guess once you're sure that this thing is working out your end users are engaging with it. They think it's useful, and this is something that you're now going with then maybe later on.

B

Now you can start making things to be perfect, but honestly most people and most end users, if you're honest with them, particularly because remember when you get your pilot users, you have a little community of people that are fully aware of the stage you're in they are fully aware that they get to give you feedback and help you to grow, um and that's what it's about. That is that's what it's about. They completely understand that some processes won't be perfect.

D

Yeah, uh I know you've been fully bootstrapped uh so far uh in a startup journey, thanks to all the hacktown and all the money you won there like. How would you what's what's the best stage at what point do you think of like raising capital from investors like? Is that something that you're thinking about and how would you approach that.

B

um It is something that we have definitely thought about, but I think it's actually been quite great to not have too much pressure around it, because we've really just been trying to grow as much as we can. I think in the beginning, it was more, let's really prove the concept: let's have our users, let's like on board as many users as we can and then once we're really sure that this is working out. Then we can consider um getting investors. It is something that we're open to.

B

Actually I mean if there is an investor that is interested, we're very open to the conversations, but in terms of growth, we've also been growing. We had our first three interns this year, which was absolutely incredible. So that's growth as well for us, so yeah.

D

And it's so so awesome ruth. Do you have another.

E

Last question: yeah: we have a question from freebie says um any strong advice for strong quotes; advice for young young age developers.

B

Yeah, um I would definitely say that it's it's actually. I don't know if it's easy everywhere else in the world to grow in a development space, but I've I mean look gain as much experience as you can um go to these events as well actually and engage with other people. I think if there is anything else that I might say, I've gained from going to hackathons engaging with um other developers is that you learn and you're able to really gauge where you also stand. um What technologies are out?

B

There learn as much as you can at this point in time, like it's quite important that you do that engage with other people put yourself out there, because um outside of development, there's a lot of other things that you learn like, for instance, I've learned um leadership.

B

um I don't know if I was a leader before last year, but those are some things that you then, just by going out there, you develop your speaking skills and all of that stuff, which are other things that are important for you as you as you grow right, because I understand the question is saying for younger aged developers, but as you grow up, you want to have other skills that are really important for you, and particularly actually speaking, is quite important because you want to be even in a corporate space.

B

You want to be able to engage and communicate whatever ideas that you've got. You want to be able to engage with clients and all of that stuff, but also, most importantly, work on your problem solving skills. I mean that is really what development is about right. So, yes, the coding skills and the perfecting your programming languages is important, but be a problem solver more than anything, because that's what this is really about.

E

Nice, thank you so much. Okay. I think we have another question so from yolanda says, um what are some of the challenges um they are faced, while looking like, while building guardian health like challenges you faced.

B

Cool, um I think one of those has been one actually kind of transitioning, from just being a tech person to actually being a business person. I think that was like one of the hardest things, because that was like a territory that we were not familiar with at all right, so to really start kind of structuring things for the startup to actually be an actual business where we're like. Okay, we're thinking like people that want to scale.

B

I think that was one of the biggest things we're actually quite fortunate, because we ended up being part of the program that kind of really taught us all of that stuff. But for me that was one of the biggest challenges um I think marketing is also one of the hardest things, because, generally you find that we don't really know the right people in the industry that we're trying to create products for so to go out there and approach doctors and approach.

B

Health professionals has been one of the hardest challenges actually, and I think it's a challenge that we're still facing, and we just I guess it gets a little bit better as you learn your market, but it definitely was one of those things that, after you have the product, how do you start using it and to stay using the product as well to retain your customers.

E

Nice, thank you so much to you. I think that's all the questions we have. Thank you for sharing all this good knowledge. um I really learned a lot. I'm sure martin's did as well.

D

Yeah, I had a a wonderful time uh during this talk, so thank you so much for all the experience or the tips- and you know, uh advice so definitely be connecting to you on linkedin and you know chatting more. How would you going forward so thank you so much uh tc.

B

No worries, thank you guys for inviting me yeah.

A

D

And please uh would have to see on zoom after after the meetup so like uh we can network with her and um ask more questions so we're gonna have a networking session on zoom. That's the link, um yeah dot, co, slash africa and we'll also have you know the speakers. You can ask the speakers. Questions specifically and roots likes the cahoots game, so we're gonna have we're. Gonna have.

D

All yeah and that's and lastly, uh please also let us know this is the last meetup for the year, so um it's gonna be january. Till we'll see you guys again we're gonna be off for december. So definitely let us know how we can improve the meetup for next year um and uh all of your feedback is valuable to us. It's just two minutes, so it's it's pretty easy. So let's have you guys on zoom? Well, I think we'll be on zoom right away. It's yeah! It's about nine here!

D

um So, let's, let's go and zoom on. You see you guys soon.

B

E

D

So much for the year I'll, let you guys.

E

Yeah bye, everyone.

D

D