Discovery: Finding the best Nigerian developers
Here’s why/how Devcenter Started.
I am an avid follower of Feyi’s posts; I feel it’s important to write on how we started Devcenter to solve this problem.
When Devcenter started, we wanted it to be a community of Nigerian developers sharing what projects they were working on. We invited our friends who were developers and in turn they invited other friends. Our original intention was to facilitate discussions and showcase around the Nigerian developer community.
With time, we made a ton of improvements to the site and more developers joined, posted links to their work and blog posts. The site was doing well, 1000+ posts were submitted by developers.
One thing kept popping up though, we kept getting requests for developers. From friends who launched startups, enterprise companies who wanted to outsource development work and from people who wanted to build apps. Our network of friends is very limited like Feyi said. We can only know so many people and be sure they would deliver great work and write proper code. We started to take on a couple of development jobs, hire developers to work on them in house and deliver. It was a mess to manage this process.
If you follow Nigerian devs on Twitter, you would have seen a couple tweets like this:
From our experience and from the community, it seemed like a lot of people just weren’t getting good developers to work on projects. We didn’t want to assume based on anecdotal evidence. So we sent out a survey to our community of developers. The survey results agreed with what we assumed — there were jobs to be filled but there was a problem finding developers.
We put out a plan to test this again and launched a simple website to allow people post the need for jobs and for developers to apply to those jobs. Descriptions for jobs would include skill set as well as availability — part time or full time. Again, we couldn’t keep up with demand. We built a sample to test but had run into the same problem as everyone else — verifying developers.
So we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves “How do we measure the skillset of a developer?” We did tons of research on how several companies in the Nigerian tech ecosystem and outside Nigeria test and hire developers. It meant we had to rebuild the whole site, put proper structure in place to connect developer profiles, get people who would test developers and also rank them.
With time, We also discovered a bigger problem, the project management problem. People engage developers have no idea how they intend to build whatever software, big businesses included. No methodology, nothing. A developer should not help you figure out what environment you want to deploy for, or create a project timeline. The dev just wants to code and get paid. This also contributes to why developers are hard to find. Most of them get uninterested by the process, even before the work starts.
So while we solve the discovery problem, we want to take a shot at the bigger problem. We also want to help people think past this and just bring their ideas to life. We believe that the future is now, where humanity is currently at its most advanced technological state possible. People and companies need other people and companies to help them carry out and achieve their dreams. We are simply here to enable ideas with the right technology, process and best people.
The new Devcenter is live. :)
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Devcenter is a community driven network of verified Software Developers and Designers in Africa.
