Meet the Hackers of Pakistan, Mexico and Zambia, etc.

Hackers, everywhere.

I am forever grateful to Colleen Taylor of TechCrunch. Her inspiring article sparked hackers from all over the globe to reach out, eager to start Hackers Of in their own communities. The week after the TechCrunch post was published, I was able to Skype with hackers looking to bring Hackers Of to countries like Pakistan, the Dominican Republic, India, Mexico, Israel, Canada, Zambia, Singapore, Italy, Kenya, Nigeria, Portugal and Romania.

Meet the hackers of your global community.

Rainier Mallol | Hackers of Santo Domingo

“The entrepreneur community is growing here in Santo Domingo. One year ago, the entrepreneurial culture didn’t exist at all. This year alone, more than twelve startups were founded. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but for our country, that is new. It’s not comparable to the United States, but for us, it’s a really big deal.

We have two Startup Weekends and three hackathons every year. Our last hackathon was actually backed by the government. It was focused on how to improve tourism and agriculture in the Dominican Republic and 11 different apps were developed. They were just incredible.

We want to put the country on the map. A lot of people don’t know that we exist, a lot of people confuse us with other countries. The goal is more jobs and more international recognition.”

How to say hacker in Spanish? Hacker.

Paolo Meola and Walter Franchetti | Hackers of Italy

“Right now we’re smoking, drinking a beer, being a hacker. It’s the Italian style. You can code while eating pizza with your friends and talking about football and politics. We always take things with a smile, and that’s what we do while hacking.

It’s natural for Italian people to hack. Pizza is a hack. The story about pizza is about a queen and a chef. The queen wanted something very elegant to eat and the chef didn’t have anything. He just mashed up things, and okay, that’s a pizza. He didn’t have enough resources. He had to build anything to solve a problem, and pizza was the solution. It’s a hack, the pizza.

Another kind of Italian hackers come from Naples. By law, we were forced to wear seatbelts while driving. In Naples, they started printing T-Shirts with a seat belt. That’s a hack.”

How to say hacker in Italian? Hacker.

Didier Quiroz | Hackers of Mexico City

“Since our government doesn’t offer a lot of services and solutions to problems, the developer community is hacking to solve social problems here in Mexico.

This movement started 4 years ago and every year, more and more people are starting to become developers. In the US, you right now have a shortage of engineers, and here in Mexico, we’re flipped. We have a lot of engineers. If you look on Business Week, you see a graph of where the IT talent in Silicon Valley is coming from. You see that the number one place is Mexico.

As my dad kindly puts it, coding and software development is the R&D of the poor, you only need a computer and a good idea to create and change your own reality, and the realities of different people.

The developer community is trying to create more and more hackathons to solve social problems here in Mexico. There’s been a huge growth in big data to help governments understand where health problems are erupting, to solve violence problems we have with the drug cartels here in Mexico.”

Mohsin Faquih | Hackers of Karachi

“Six months ago, there was a small hackathon sponsored by Google. There were a lot of glitches. People were a bit unclear as to what exactly is a
hackathon, and to what level are people supposed to be prototyping. They were given a 24 hour period, they slept at the same place, ate at the same place, they were there all night. This was something being done for the very first time. I’m sure that when they do it the next time around, it will go smoother.

Changes in mobile technology, especially mobile banking, have really impacted the lives of rural Pakistanis that come down to the city to find work. Five or ten years ago, if they were to send money to their loved ones back home, they would usually, I don’t know— I can’t even imagine how they would manage to do that. First of all, they can’t read and write so conventional banking would be too complicated for them, so once every four or six months, they would probably take the money home themselves or send it by someone’s hands. But right now with mobile banking, they can send that money in a moment’s notice.

It’s very encouraging. People are getting into the tech scene, especially students.”

How to say hacker in Urdu? Jugaadu.

Charles Mwanza | Hackers of Zambia

“Most rural people depend on agriculture. It’s their primary source of income. They used to have to walk for ten hours to travel to Lusaka, the capital, just to find that their money is not ready. With the introduction of mobile money, people have been able to transact just using SMS. That has helped farmers receive their payments in time.

The other thing is that there are no labs at the rural health posts. There’s a car that picks up the specimens that should be tested. It used to take 30 days for people to receive their test results. So if someone has malaria, they won’t know until after 30 days. Now, they’ve made it easy for medical practitioners to receive results just using SMS. That 30 days was cut in half.

We had our first hackathon three years ago. I was at the first one. It was really exciting. It was something new. It was a Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon. We had no idea what a hackathon was. It was exciting that people could brainstorm within two days and come up with app ideas. At the first hackathon, no apps came out of that. It was more of a learning and ideation process.

People are so hungry for knowledge here. I see Zambia being a tech hub for Southern Africa. People are starting their own startups, people are trying to make apps. There’s a lot of growth that will come in the next few years.”

How to say hacker in Nyanja? Hacker.

Christian Borys | Hackers of Toronto

“It’s crazy. It’s not on the New York or the Valley level, but our downtown is full of startups. There’s a really solid community of people, and a big interest in seeing Toronto become a world leader.

It’s growing, but it’s not like any cafe you walk into, you’ll hear people talking about their startups or doing mock-ups. Toronto is still very much the finance capital of Canada. It’s still kind of taboo to risk everything and go for that crazy dream of trying to build a massive company, but it seems that every day, more and more people are realizing that Toronto has these crazy companies that are coming up.

At SXSW, they had an accelerator program just for that week. Three of the five companies were from Toronto and they were all wearable companies. There’s so much talent here in terms of engineering. We have the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto, which is like our Harvard. There’s a ton of talent that comes out of there. People also just want to live in Toronto. It’s a fantastic place to live, like a mini New York, but clean.”

Eric Gichuri | Hackers of Nairobi

“We need to reach out to students. There was a project trying to be implemented where primary school kids would be given laptops. I don’t know about the politics, but that would be a good thing if kids in primary school had access to computers. Unless you are in a very good school, you start learning about computers when you go to high school.

The future is bright. It’s positive. We have quite a number of incubation centers and they’re reaching out to students in universities. I think that with time, we will have very many people involved in development.”

How to say hacker in Swahili? Hacker.

Raul Ciotescu | Hackers of Romania

“It’s a very active community with lots of different interests and people. Here, most of the tech companies are in the outsourcing business, and there’s a lot of creative people here. I think that a site like Hackers of Romania, where people can present what they’ve done, is really great. It would bring them more visibility to what they actually are and what they can do.”

How to say hacker in Romanian? Hacker.

Mariana Teixeira | Hackers of Portugal

“We have a great spirit. We work hard, we love what we do. This is a new generation, we are full of ideas. We are total hackers and we want to share.

We want to promote hackers and companies created by youngsters. Although they are really young, they have genius ideas, are really putting up and developing big companies.

I think five, six years ago, hackers were seen as people that don’t belong with other people, but now I think it’s changing. I think that now that Portugal is in a recession, we are getting a lot of really hard workers, people that really give everything to have a job and have to go outside the box to be creative. The future will be really positive, especially for the hacker community.”

How to say hacker in Portuguese? Hacker.

Ohad Folman| Hackers of Tel Aviv

“In Tel Aviv, there are 4000 startups. It’s kind of crazy. Israel has more startups than Europe and China combined. Go to Meetups, put in Tel Aviv, and you’ll see there’s something happening every day at all the big companies: Google, Cisco, Intel. Intel has four campuses in Israel. They consume 1% of the country’s electricity. Given, Israel has developed some really sick stuff.

The inkjet was invented in Israel, the voicemail, which we hate, was invented in Israel. The cell phone was created in the Motorola labs here. The pentium on all the chips were designed here. There’s a lot going on—voice over IP—just fun stuff.”

How to say hacker in Hebrew? Hacker.

Darryl Doonie and Romina Monasterio | Hackers of Miami

“Miami has finally caught the attention of entrepreneurs from all over the world. As a result, the start-up scene here is growing exponentially. Aside from the beaches, weather, and lifestyle, Miami has all the components to truly help hackers succeed. With over 10 incubators, 15 shared working spaces, billions of dollars in potential capital, and easy access to the Americas, hackers now have an environment in which they can flourish.

There is a neighborhood for everyone. Professional hackers may prefer Brickell, while the trendy and hipster hackers may prefer the graffiti-lined walls of Wynwood, and of course there is Miami Beach for the laid back hacker.

Hackers of Miami is the platform to provide these pioneers the exposure they deserve. We’ll introduce the world to the the Hackers of Miami, one story at a time.”