13hours

Ask them to give you a guaranteed schedule of sales that you will hold them to. They'll say it's absurd, you can't predict that. Turns out it's the same with software dev.

If you find yourself arguing about this with management or sales, they're not trusting you to be the expert at what you do. Tell them that.

Almost at the end : "Yes, all this sounds like a lot of work". Exactly. And it will most probably still turn out to be wrong, because you will forget to ask some questions, and there will be things that you simply cannot foresee that will influence the time.

Turns out it's pointless to even try to do this. So why waste valuable time to do all this, if you know it's not the truth anyway? The answer is to accept that you will learn things as you go along, and that things take as long as they take, and to rather deal with that. Marketing wants a product by Christmas. Fine, we can do that. They just cannot say what needs to be in that product by Christmas. They can have whatever the last production quality release is at that stage. Instead of taking many weeks or months to try and answer all these estimation questions, we start and tackle the high risk items first. We learn from them, readjust, and as we get closer to the deadline, we keep communicating with all the other stakeholders what we think will be delivered on that date. It's a narrowing cone of uncertainty. One sprint before the deadline we'll be pretty accurate in predicting what it will be. 2 or 3 sprints before, accurate enough to be able to do marketing. At the start : the best we can predict is simply whether we feel we can have something useful at the deadline.

Also from Cape Town, we build mobile products (apps are part of what we do). One of our first products was a mobile game (don't want to spam it here, PM me if you want a link), and we've built many products for both local and international markets since. We learnt a few things from it: - The SA market is much too small to make a return on the investment. - The international market is difficult to get into from South Africa. Marketing a game to the point where it makes a good return is expensive, even more so from SA.

There are many people in Cape Town building games though, have a look at http://makegamessa.com/

If working with us sounds more interesting than a typical fintech job, let me know and we can chat.

"No problem"?

No wucking furries cunts!

Soon to be New Zealand's most popular dating site.

My view is a project is only a success if all stakeholders are happy at the end. To succeed, you therefore need to: 1. Know who all the stakeholders are 2. Know what they expect 3. Come up with a plan to satisfy 2 4. As you go along, and you see reality differs from 3, you must either change 2 or change 3, or a bit of both.

A PM's job is expectation management. Delivering on expectation will most of the time include having to change the expectation to match the reality at the end of the project. It's usually easier to change expectations earlier rather than later, and also by not saying "no", but rather by saying "let's rather do this".

I didn't know at that stage. I don't know if it would have influenced me to not have children.

Genetically I have a 50% chance of getting Parkinsons. My father was diagnosed earlier this year, and 2 of his 4 siblings already have it. There's a medical study being done on our family to try and identify the gene responsible, but we already know my cousins and I have a 50% chance. I'm not sure I'd even want to know whether it's 100% if they were able to do the tests. Not until there's a possible cure for it. Knowing won't change anything if I can't do anything about it. I guess I'm still in denial, trying to just ignore it away for now.

I just hope there's a cure by the time my children (6 and 3 now) get to my age, otherwise I'll advise them to think hard about having children and passing on the gene.

As a South African, I never realised we have a few airports that are actually the closest to a large part of the Antarctic coast. I know there are flights from Chile and New Zealand to Antarctica, but none that I'm aware of from South Africa.

I find Twitter to be second only to YouTube in comment trolls.

>Actually some years ago a friend gave me a cell phone. Once I turned it on, and some complicated dialog came up about my reading some contract and sending money. I turned the thing off and haven't turned it back on since.

You and RMS will get along well I suspect.

I'd go even further, and actually discuss it with them before making these changes, not just hand in the signed contract with the clear changes. Tell them : "I'm uncomfortable with this. What would make me comfortable is ..." and then detail what you are describing.

Also : the world wide web didn't exist yet, you couldn't just visit StackOverflow to get an answer to a problem you had. Formal course work was a great place to communicate with like minded peers and exchange ideas and learn from each other.

"It would be in the interest of US-Soviet relations" - in 2005?!

The best payment apps are apps like Uber, where the payment is no longer visible, and the app adds some other value to the user. I agree that general payment apps that aim to simply replace cards don't have enough of a value proposition.

"part of the money from sponsorship goes to donation"

Can you elaborate on what part, and to whom specifically?

This makes me think : what are good ways to try and protect myself against this? How can I, as a software developer and entrepreneur leverage this to my advantage? What does this tell me about where the big opportunities will be in 3,5 and 10 years so I can begin positioning myself there?

How about if the income is in your country of origin? Can't your side project just pay out where ever you're from? It's the Internet, websites aren't really located anywhere.

Native mobile SDKs would be fantastic. We often have to develop mobile apps for clients where there is a need for a relational db in the cloud that the client can maintain with data. The app has to access that data to displayed, as well as add new data.

tldr; "It will be the device of the year, because Apple. I don't know enough details to give any better reason, but hey, it's Apple".

I suspect the problem with deploying this on a large scale to fight Malaria for example, is that mosquito breeding areas are often very large areas, and change in location due to environmental changes. This device is probably a good fit for stopping mosquitos breeding in the pond outside your house, but for stopping malaria you need to cover a very large area.

Piracy is a well known synonym for copyright infringement. I would agree with you that something like "theft" would not be a good term to use, but Piracy is spot-on.

I sort of find it a little sad that very talented people have this god like image of someone like Steve. Without them he would have been nothing, but still he gets all the glory and fear, and they get little respect.

I'd love to hear more about the Android team's CI tools. What do you build with? What do you test with?

If you can build some kind of SaaS Android CI system, you'd probably make heaps of cash. Android CI is just enough of a pain to do yourself that people would pay for a one click type solution.

He kinda reminds me of Woz in that way. Except Woz was never seen as evil, and Bill had an evil image for a while there in the 90s and early 2000s.

Each one of those ton of things have been solved by Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry in many of the countries Google doesn't support. They can copy what any one of these 3 did if they really wanted to help developers.

Here in South Africa for example, it has been possible for at least 3 years to sell apps on iTunes, on Samsung Apps, and BlackBerry Apps world. So there's most probably not some major stumbling block that prevents it, as these other companies overcame it.

>If you want to make money, stop waiting for other people to do the dirty work for you.

The dirty work developers like us have been doing up to now was to implement an alternative mechanism for receiving payments, like the developer in the article. When Google bans that, there simply is no other way to receive payments. Or are you able to come up with an alternative way for developers to do the dirty work themselves? I know I'm very keen to know of one, as are many other Android developers in South Africa, Kenia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, etc.

Just curious, because other comments also mention staying as long as you can and then getting a rental : wouldn't the first part mess up your credit record so badly that you couldn't get a rental? Here in South Africa I'm pretty sure almost no landlord will rent you something with a bad credit record like that (having gone through the process of renting a place and seeing all the proof they require that you'll be able to pay). Probably because it's very hard to get rid of tenants once they're in though, so you have to make sure they're ok before they move in. Is it different in the States?

Same thing with employing someone here, you have to be very sure they'll fit, because it's VERY hard to fire someone.

Anything similar that supports Android?