One of the most commonly used practice for developing software businesses is agile. At its core, agile is a process of iterating on a product. The industry has been heavily relying on agile for years it became the defacto way of building software. Even if a said organization didn’t adopt agile, they use some variant of it. What happen when agile fails us. I have long been keen to collect feedbacks about why tech startups have failed in Sudan. I know the trivial answer would be financial reasons: lack of access to funds; inflations and market uncertainities. But what if the problem was much deeper than that. Tirhal at some point was evaluated for 7 figures (4M dollars), but now they are barely able to pay for their own employees. That definitely doesn’t comform to our trivial answer. ...

Software takes time and it can be quite unpredictable. I built the first version of noebs, a PoC that basically does nothing but acting as a reverse proxy to ebs in less than a week. It took some years later to add some functionalities that we initially created issues for them in ~ 2019. That doesn’t mean we necessarily spent the 3 years just trying to fix that– simply we shifted our priorities to other issues, or topics. ...

As a teenager, i grew very conservative. I only had my first girl-friend in first college year. Only to have my first kiss at my first year of having a full-time job, right after graduation. I never really liked parties or going out. A classic introverted person. My 16 personalities test is an INFP so yeah. growing up Nothing has changed really. I don’t smoke, i don’t do weed either, nor do i drink. That’s okay generally, there’s really nothing to do more with that regard. Smoking is not my thing really since i have terrible respiratory system. Getting high seems really good, but I am afraid it might turn super addictive, same applies to drinking. I have had terrible times getting up on my feet again and the only coping was to put more effort into my career and coding. Had i had that option of drugs or alchohol, things would have turned very South. ...

If you ever have a secret book, a secret twitter / facebook account or a blog. A secret place you share your VERY own stuff, please by all means I would be the happiest into being one of your readers! I love reading people’s thoughts. This is really the only thing i do so passionately and brings in about huge joy to my life. Books, articles, twitter-shitposting-accounts, whatever that medium that shows that encapsulates the you you! It is amazing and it is one of my sincerest hobbies. ...

I have a decision making problem. I’m super good at making on-spot hard decisions. But i suck at making casual decisions: i take REALLY long time deciding between two types of water bottles. A friend of mine resigned from their job and that took me by surprise. Never in my career had i resigned from my job, really. 2017-2018 first professional employment type: i worked as a part-time TA and researcher at UofK, my contract was for year. i didn’t extend it 2018-2019: worked as a software engineer at Ashrafcom. I decided not to renew my contract. I’m still good friend with the company’s directors and chair 2017-?: Established Shargii and founded several businesses within. In 2021, i no longer work as a full-time there, but i still have share there. That could be the closest i get into resigning 2021-present: tuti. i founded tuti and i don’t really plan on resigning from my job. It could be that i mostly worked on my own startups that made it difficult to resign, but it still feels rather difficult for me to resign from a job. ...

I have long since I lost the taste of days. Maybe it is just an age thing and Sudan is also too much. I often would find it too hard to recall what a day in a week we are, and in many cases I would find myself wondering it is actually Wednesday. Weekends are my chill although I must say, I still find a reason to not chill. I only learned to say “Enjoy your weekend” quite late in my career in 2019, for me weekends were the bestest times you could achieve more in your tasks. ...

noebs is couple of yours old now, actually next October it will complete its 4th year. That’s a lot of years especially in Sudan, software are rather dropped quickly. what is noebs? noebs is an open source payment gateway. Currently it implements all of EBS services, it supports both EBS Merchant Web Services and Consumer Web Services. It also comes with a built-in support for the new Dynamic Fees model. We also support QR services and the new Merchant Web APIs. In that, I know of none that actually have such thorough level of coverage and actively being developed. So yaaay to us! ...

Technology scares me, and don’t even get me started on how AI and that crazy shit have serious consequences that we are not adapted, that we have not considered at all. Tech companies emphasized their own revenue over making the humanity better – errr making its users better. And those incentives don’t align with what the actual users want. For example, a keyboard software. Let’s say google’s GBoard. It is fantastic, it is smart enough to predict and corrects their typing mistakes. That is wonderful, amazing! ...

I’m in awe. I’m grateful for all of you guys, I’m grateful to my parents, siblings, close friends and amongst them my online friends. I will write back about my feelings later. But you made a soul happy.

I argue engineers and managers to actively seek to shorten work days and work hours. 9-5 / 5 days is such an arbitrarily concept and it doesn’t translate at all to productivity, in fact counter to that it is the most unproductive thing we might ever have. Apart from the common wisdom to avoid burnouts, breaks are really super important. I argue against us having 5-days work scheme. It is way too much, it is quite useless too, and we lose lots of productvity and peak-performance and creative thinking, just to ensure that employees stay longer in the offices. Now that i have several years of experience ranging between academic (2017-2018), big corp (2018-2019), and startups (2019-now), i can see i have experienced both: i perform well for even the strictiest 9-5 jobs. But it is just a above-the-bar kinda of performane. I performed magnificentely great during my own startup years where i was able to take days and almost weeks off as i please. I understand that taking hiatus is not very welcomed since we run through different tight deadlines as our business requires, but the strict 9-5 Sunday-Thursday is not better either. ...