I had a delightful conversation with a friend of mine about the state of open source in Sudan, we discussed many topics but the main question was: why open source is not prominent in Sudan? Software industry in Sudan is not that mature yet, most of what we work on are rather simple crud operations. I feel that we still didn’t reach that point where businesses have worked through complicated business requirements that they decided hey let’s abstract all of that onto packages and modules we could use by other teams in other projects. Abstractions should be reached through natural system’s evolution. There are also economical aspects, we don’t have that luxury in Sudan to be fully dedicated for open source. ...

Payment in Sudan is rather a very interesting challenge. But, my focus today is on this rather unique characteristic: trust. I will take Bok, the mobile wallet app for bank of khartoum. It is the largest app in Sudan, backed by the biggest bank in Sudan. It has around two million users, and it became synomyoum to payment in general. If it is a payment channel, then in most case it will be BoK. ...

Today is the first day i enjoyed a quiet night in ages. I went back home rather very early at 330 and took a lovely nap too. Chatted with my friends and roomates, and shitposted on facebook. Now, i’m embrassing the nothingness, it is raining and I enjoy the sound of rain in the background, though I also indeed enjoy playing in the rain. I don’t have electricity at the moment, but I don’t feel pissed for that too. The rain in the background as well as a new episode of King of the ring as well. there’s something liberating about not worrying about many things… enjoying the emptyiness. It feels good actually, it feels very fresh. I can also think more openly, and reflect on things. I can also get to work on other things, I have that capacity to think well beyond my $day job and other responsibilities. ...

I notice this general feeling of discomfort amongst my colleagues and friends. Situation in Sudan is not the best, and the grass is always greener on the other side. There are extremely good reasons for that, this is not what this post is trying to address. I don’t think life is meant to be comfortable, nor easy. But we can have fun and work our asses while we are at it. ...

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. ...