Safaricom Engineering Community – Giving Developers a Seat at The Table

Safaricom Engineering Community – Giving Developers a Seat at The Table

Last week, Safaricom held its first ever Engineering Summit, dubbed Safaricom De{c0}dE. This is a developer-centric conference that sought to give developers at Safaricom and the larger dev community in Kenya a chance to showcase their talent to the world. I and a team of brilliant colleagues were at the center of the planning and execution of the event. The event came and went, but the effects still continue to reverberate across Kenya and Africa.

As the discussion on the future of the Kenyan tech ecosystem and the role of the Safaricom engineering community continues online, I have had a chance to reflect on the success of the summit and why we need to have a sustained and vibrant engineering community that takes charge of the tech narrative in the country and the African continent. We are living in interesting times, and being a techie is a huge privilege. Everyone who finds himself or herself in the tech space in whatever capacity has a moral responsibility to create an environment where more people are able to join hands in “fixing the broken African pot.” Tech has become the greatest equalizer, and so as African techies, we have to be very intentional by leveraging the tools and tech talent we have in building the “Wakanda Dream.” We are the Silicon Savanna, and the recent tech clustering in Nairobi is a testament to that reality that we should all be very proud of.

My favorite read so far, this year is “Ask Your Developer: How to Harness The Power of Software Developers and Win In the 21st Century” by Jeff Lawson – CEO and Co-founder of Twilio. This book speaks to something very dear to me – developers and their place in a corporate hierarchy. The Safaricom De{c0}dE is a very intentional effort aimed at giving developers the recognition that they deserve.

Today, digital transformation is not just a buzzword anymore. Every industry, even those that no one would ever imagine could go digital, is having some form of “digital transformation.” From banking to manufacturing, to agriculture, name it; every company is now a software company in some shape or form. It is this shift of focus to a software-dominated economy that has tilted the scale in favor of software developers. It is in every company’s best interest to treat developers, not as cost-centers, but as important stakeholders who deserve a fat seat at the decision-making table.

Take any company, in any industry; say banking. As every company rushes to have digital touchpoints like an app or a website for interacting with its customers, there is always that debate on buy vs build.  A company can decide to focus on its core business, say banking services and outsource the app development to an IT consultant. This actually makes solid business, and it’s a model that a lot of companies have always relied upon with great success. Every non-IT company would almost always buy software and focus on their core business. The problem with this model is that it can lead to a situation where competitors have digital touchpoints that are copy cuts of the other. In the words of Lawson, you cannot buy differentiation, you can only build it. The rule of thumb, therefore, is that anything that differentiates you from the rest, you should build. This is why developers are important stakeholders in every company today. They will help you build unique customer-facing software that will truly excite customers and keep them hooked.

Software development is a creative art. However, a lot of companies often treat developers like digital factory workers with a strict hierarchy where the people at the top supposedly know all the answers (maybe they do, but not always). In such an arrangement, developers would typically be expected to read top-down specification documents and are expected to create solutions out of them. The obvious gap in this approach is that most of the time developers do not get a chance to buy into the why. In the words of Lawson, “Give developers problems, not solutions.” We need a mindset shift where developers are assigned problems, not tasks. Through vibrant communities, like the Safaricom Engineering Communities, developers will get a chance to express themselves creatively, share knowledge amongst themselves, contribute to open source projects and build things that truly seek to transform lives. Most developers admit to finding motivation and passion in problem-solving quests. A vibrant community that recognizes engineers as the true experts will give them purpose and will also demonstrate the confidence that the industry has in their creativity.

As I sign off, I am proud to be associated with the Safaricom Engineering community as a co-host. The community houses a lot of different chapters, among them cloud, architecture, UI/UX, cyber security, DevSecOps, Big Data, AI and ML, et cetera. Join our Meetup to be part of future community engagements. Come interact and network with our community patrons, community leads, and community members who have domain experts across the various software engineering specialties. Here is a link to our meetup page:  https://www.meetup.com/safaricom-engineering-community/


 

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