You are too technical This week was a little bit fun for me. I had this incident where one of our clients has had a meeting with us and in the process he made joke about my technical skills–as in they the business owners use us the coders to do their stuff. It was indeed a bad joke, but it led me into writing this post. I wanted to share with you how extremely excited I am of being a programmer and the myth behind “technical term”. ...

Preface A subsidy or government incentive is a form of financial aid or support extended to an economic sector (business, or individual) generally with the aim of promoting economic and social policy1. MOBILE money in Africa comes in different flavours. The sophisticated sort, exemplified by services such as M-Pesa in Kenya[…]. This sort uses pre-paid mobile-airtime minutes as a de facto currency that can be transferred between phones, exchanged for cash with dealers…2 ...

This post is about how to design libraries. It can help you write good code that you can reuse it in other different parts. don’t do too much We will take examples to make it more clear. When working with Cashqbot our Telegram Payment Bot. We have /rate feature which allows our users to get the USD rate of today Thanks to the folks of price today. I will just go through how we implmeneted this feature and what we can learn from that. ...

We run noebs and it is by far the most feature complete payment middleware in Sudan. Noebs is used by different banks and other payment providers, in addition to us. This post is not about that, I want to discuss more on what is it like to build such a system. When doing software, we almost always tend to make more features, and many times it is because of the sheer joy of doing so. Fixing bugs is boring, and optimizing the system to gain more performance is quite hard. The easiest thing is to just build a new feature! This is also very clear when adopting a new technology or maintaining the old one. We all love the shiny new thing. ...

I love coding and I’d argue it is one of the most joyful things to do–it has its rough edges, but still though. If you take joy out of programming it becomes a task, and people often times don’t love tasks, or the obligation there of. I came from engineering background, with some academia background as well. I could not handle acdemia, I wanted to build stuff. Well, after all i’m a hacker. I love to tweak parameters and play with different settings. Maybe that’s why my career in academia never took off. ...

E-purse Types of cards There are mainly three types of cards, depending on the way money is withdrawn to the merchant’s account: debit card: where the money is automatically deduced from your bank account. It is directly linked to your account, which means you need to have a enough money or an agreed upon overdraft 1. credit card: they are not linked to your account, they allow you to buy things immediatelly and pay for their costs at a later time. I find the urge to elaborate more on this part as it is quite interesting. You have a credit score It’s a cumulative number that measures your success relative to others, in this case grading you as a credit-worthy individual. 3 ...

This post is about systems, APIs, business decisions. Payment Nearly every transaction involves three parties: a merchant that accepts the card, a bank that issues it, and a payment network that facilitates the transaction between the first two parties. You hear the term PCI a lot. The standard was created to increase controls around cardholder data to reduce credit card fraud. ~ Wikipedia We (financial institutions) offer our clients (card holders) these services to ease their access into their accounts. In most cases, the bank takes the liability for any frauds that happen. So, PCI standards are used in the whole payment process, in the card, POS, and the payment network itself, EBS. It is the industry best practices for the security. ...

I’ve always been dreaming of teaching. I worked as a teaching assistant at University of Khartoum, Geomatics Engineering department. I’ve TAed different classes–mostyl computational/programming ones. It was very nice experience, I couldn’t be more happier. Though, I have some notes. National Service The national service is the single most evil, human rights violation thing has ever been done. Our governers are literally using us to cover for their economical failures. The national service is a one year that each graduate student should serve in military. Usually, people prefer to do their national service in non-military places. That was exploited pretty well bad by the government sector. In my case, I wasn’t physically fitted to do my national service in a miliant facility. Luckily, I met all the requirements to be accepted at UofK. ...

We are very pleased to announce new internships at gndi. G&I (gndi for short) is a tech company that provides a wide range of geospatial solutions and services for corporates and for individuals as well. Why is that? This initiatives came as a response to one my posts. Clearly there is a problem in our system. There is no systematic way of getting a job. Every year, tons of peoples are graduating from colleges. Industry cannot cover this number of graduates. ...

E-learning rocks There are several reasons to use e-learning based system as oppose of the classical ones. Hosting all the course materials online can help our students a lot. They will find the materials of the course available 24/7. But that will also help us, too. As an instructor (for both G&I and UofK), I found it to be very time consuming to maintain a class. However, when we moved our works online, things have changed. The online forum accompanied with the website help students answer each others’ questions–that saved me lots of time, and helped the class understand the materials much better. Not only that, I found it to be much easier to respond to the class questions. Students know where to write their problems, I know where to find them. I now know what questions (what part of the class they suffer at it much), and how can I address such problems. ...