Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

In my study of Calculus, I delved a bit into the pre-calculus era and I came across a very interesting concept by Zeno of Elea.

The most famous of Zeno’s paradoxes is a race between a tortoise and the legendary Achilles called, appropriately, the Achilles. Zeno contends that if the tortoise has a head start, no matter how small, Achilles will never be able to close the distance. To do so, he’d have to travel half of the distance separating them, then half of that, ad nauseum, presenting the same dilemma illustrated by the Dichotomy.

No matter what!

A (above) fractal used to explain the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea — a movement can become impossible if its distance is recurrently divided into smaller pieces. The girl is assumed to walk three times as fast as the turtle, but whenever she turns a corner the turtle will, too. Even though she is faster, she will not see the turtle within a finite number of turns.

The Kenyan Coder’s Paradox

As we strive to make it to MkwanjaVille via code, we face a path that is finite, buy has infinite snooker points. As with any journey one takes, Before one can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a fourth, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.

In essence, the journey can never ‘really’, get started!

Every step has a snooker

A client will not give you a job until you propose in their desired format, even if you have the right solution. The proposal will not be accepted until the price is right (favoring the client), the price is right and the proposal is OK, but you must ona mtu kando or kiss the deal goodbye. You have betrayed your anti-corruption mantra and done that evil thing but you now must wait for 1 month for a response. After one month, your well-research proposal is given to a competing company whose MD is a friend of a friend of the project managers.

If you get the deal, you must wait for 60 days to be paid, if you are lucky. The clients never have any qualms authorizing the job but GOD help you if you dare suggest you might need to be paid. And then what? Downpayment? Are you nuttz?

And the best goes on.

More Info on Zeno here.

Well, yesterday, as always, I was just hacking some network that a certain client had authorized me to do medium-risk penetration testing on and I got an SMS. ‘new email from google’.

Normally, I have configured my SMS deamons powered by www.tumasms.com to only alert me (via sms) on emails from Mike of Zim, Mbugua, Zunguka Home, Server FAM and Disk Monitors and My wifey (only if the email contains keywords like emergency, baby, hospital and sick). Of course, this list changes every week. But somehow, my metaheuristics code deemed the google email as *important*.

So I switched windows and read the email and BAM! It was an enquiry from google as to whether Idd Salim would be interested to work for them, giving me a choice of Dublin, London or Zurich as my residence.

The dilemma

Alot of my friends, ‘students’, mentors and twitter followers see me as a classic case of a hustler who hopefully can prove that a Kenyan Enterprenuer can come from NOTHING to SOMETHING via code. We don’t have the funding of the facebooks of this world, so our best brains always turn into code-for-food gurus who hustle to pay for server bills, rather that sit and code! Most ‘investors’ we meet are just talkers, jokers, greedy, vultures, old-school or a combination of the 5.

I always advice people on how they should never give up on their cause and that I will personally do my CSR to make sure their code is more profitable, e.g. via APIs like for TumaSMS and pay.Zunguka and advice.

“Google has big tits like Pam and as hot as Hale Berry. When she turns her head your side, you BETTER be ready to embrace the chance with open arms and open legs. This is a once in a lifetime chance.”, Said Jack, My Accountant. “Respond positively to Google’s email.” He said.

“You need to move a step up, Salim. At the current state, you are better off getting a serious permanent job because this Kenyan Hassle Bull*#@t has no fruits. You could have been VERY FAR right now were it not for this self-employment crap. It does not work in Kenya. Not unless the government does something to support the BEST coders. You have the brains, but as long as you have to worry about rent and milk every month, then you will not exploit your full potential!”, Adviced Buju, angrily.

I am confused.

Back to code!

One API to rule them all...

Great day today for Kenyan coders. Ok, let us say, EastAfrican Community coders, for political correctness. I don’t even know how to break this news, so I will just do it my plain no-beating-around-her-bushes method. No, the Octopus has not predicted that Safaricom, MTN and Zain will start supporting local innovations. No. The octopus would rather die than err. To err is to human; not to octopus.So, the hustle continues.

As a CSR, being  head of a team of very gifted coders at Symbiotic, I had committed to head the Pay.Zunguka Gateway and API development team and see to it that the Pay.Zunguka API was out before Mid May 2010. But one thing did not lead to another, and we had to inevitable delay the launch.

Well, here it is now. The API. The EuberAPI. One API to rule them all.

Download the API NOW!!

So first things first. What is an API, you would ask? Huh? You are having a larf if you expect me to answer that!! The API has been developed in PHP, jQuery and MySQL and the documentation provided with it makes it totally idiot-proof. Anyone and everyone can use the API and start earning from their hustle, Immediately! All transactions from Mpesa/Zap/yuCash will hit your system, via the API in 5 seconds. Anyone who can copy-paste, can use the API.

Safaricom have indirectly played ball this time round, so flawless end-to-end mPesa support is the first feature of the API. I hope this will not make them Mad. My QA team is still testing the ZAP and yuCash modules, but jump to it. Play with the fully working mPesa support and share your thought on the approach, the model, the logic and the illogic.

If you are a ‘BIG’ fish (read a big corporate with a lot of sensitive transactions) and don’t want to use our API as a payment aggregator, we can license the actual product. This would apply to guys like DSTV and KPLC. So instead of waiting for 48 hours for the transactions to hit their backend system, we can guarantee KPLC customers that their bills paid via Mpesa/Zap/yuCash will be reflected in their account within 5-7 seconds. Cute huh!

Like all my friends will tell you (real friends, not facebook jokers), I believe in seeing, showing and action. Si mdomo mob. So dive right into it! Visit http://pay.zunguka.com/ NOW and have a blast !!

Wazi.

-Salim, Idd

Mxit - Sleeping giant. So far...

Well, After receiving a few phone-calls and some random emails, I have decided to be positive and share a unique insight on the Immense power of the Collabo between Our beloved Safaricom and Mxit. They might not be doing so well, as we bloggers and alot of arm-chair IT consultants might have analyzed.

Straight to the point, The first step is to address the current hurdles, then to look at the revenue engines.

Locus Standi

Mxit support the Moola system but is  not being used heavily, if at all, in Kenya because very few people have credit cards. So revenue from  Moola is Zilch. Mxit needs to contact the servers in SA for the XMPP requests and semi-HTTP requests and thus costs users more than normal browsing.

Safaricom has about 1.5 M people on data [unverified].  A great majority of these can  be converted to Mxit users if :

• Mxit would develop a lighter app with less data guzzle. Implementation of compression and better and more-spaced session re-tries. Every byte counts.
• Safaricom would come up with a Mxit Bundle (SupaMxitta) and allow people to subscribe to a buffet model of e.g. 10 bob per day like they are doing on Facebook.
• Mxit would center itself on content and other value-additions like an mMall system by partnering with establishments like Maduqa.com for data and Mocality for business information.
• Mxit Moola system would ride off a fully working and tested MicroPayment Aggregator like pay.zunguka.com. This employs a pay-once-spend-may-times model for people’s money and would move Mpesa traffic and also data traffic as MXit becomes the de’facto mobileMall for Kenya. One deposits money via Mpesa, it gets converted to Moolas and then they can spend it on Virtual and real goods, in the Mxit community.

My work is done.

Back to code!