In the second edition of our Facts & Snacks lunchtime events, we chatted to Alexandria Procter, the Founder and CEO of DigsConnect about how this non-product tech CEO creates a helpful remote environment for her product team to thrive and perform.

Check out the video of our conversation here! (https://bit.ly/3hyUWiR)

Jason Grishkoff is the CEO and founder of the music community platform SubmitHub — and he’s also the entire development team. As a CEO-and-solo developer combo, Jason’s approach to developing features for his company is a little different to most.

In this article, Jason shares his strategies for developing and releasing new features as a solo developer who’s also the CEO. He discusses how not having a team of developers helping him decide which features to build means he relies a lot more on his relationship with his users, and how he has to timeblock his productivity in order to maximise the quality of time he spends coding when he’s not ‘CEO-ing’.

Check out the video and read the blog post here! (https://bit.ly/2YE32PQ)

At our first Facts & Snacks lunchtime event with SA’s leading entrepreneurs, we chatted to Sumarie Greybe, co-founder of Naked Insurance about how COVID-19 has impacted the local insurance space, her best advice for disrupting traditional industries, and what’s next in AI-powered InsurTech innovation.

Check out the video here! (https://bit.ly/3htCd80)

Christian Gill is a senior software engineer at Catawiki. He’s been a fan of using TypeScript, and even spearheaded its integration into his previous company’s tech stack. At Catawiki in particular, he enjoys TypeScript because of its ease-of-use across their vertical and horizontal team systems. Not only does it make it easy for his teams to work across codebases, but it also lets them easily scale their systems and free up a lot of their time as developers.

In this conversation, Christian shares why he likes using TypeScript, and highlights some of the benefits he enjoys. He also shares some advice on how to get started with it.

Watch the video, or check out the full transcription here! (https://bit.ly/3aBLdp2)

You can also reach out the Christian via his website!

Companies are increasingly hiring remotely, which can open the talent pool of developers from hyper-local to international. However, selling top candidates on your company's mission and team culture without meeting them in person can be really hard. When hiring remotely, it’s incredibly important to focus on how you tell your company’s story, and the way you position a role to a candidate.

We spoke to two top tech sourcers, Sjamilla van der Tooren and Vanessa Raath, to discuss the opportunities and challenges that come with sourcing and hiring tech talent remotely. Sjamilla has worked for companies like Zenly, and now sources tech talent at Dutch bike company VanMoof, and Vanessa freelances from South Africa and hosts recruitment workshops for hiring specialists around the world. Both have presented at conferences and meetups, and both are active members of the tech recruitment space.

Some of the questions we explored in our discussion include:

• How do I know if someone can actually work effectively in a remote team?
• If developers can work remotely for any company in the world, how do I compete with tech ‘giants’?
• How do I present my company to a candidate when I can’t bring them into the office?

Check out the full conversation Q&A, or watch the video of our discussion here! (https://bit.ly/2XYkUEr)

Walmyr Lima e Silva Filho is an ex-GitLab software engineer in testing — and, in his experience, developers generally don’t enjoy writing tests: It takes time to write them, and they often fail unreliably, which means spending even more time figuring out why the test failed. However, since using a testing framework called Cypress.io, Walmyr’s tests are not only more reliable, but he spends far less time writing them.

In this conversation, Walmyr talks about why he likes using Cypress so much. He highlights his experiences with the benefits Cypress has as a testing framework, and some advice on how to get started with it.

Follow along the conversation with the chapter summary below, or watch the video here! (https://bit.ly/33yx22O)

If you have any questions on Cypress, get in touch with Walmyr via his website or his LinkedIn. You can also take one of his Udemy courses on Cypress.

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[04:34] Skateboarding, and an introduction to Walmyr!
[15:12] What is Cypress.io?
[16:16] Who Cypress.io is built for, and why Walmyr calls it “developer-friendly”
[17:41] What problems it solves for Walmyr, and what it enables him to do
[19:03] “Quality is everyone’s responsibility”: Why devs/testers should try Cypress.io
[28:05] Challenges Walmyr has faced with Cypress.io
[31:11] Approaches to those challenges: “Different tools solve different problems”
[33:33] Using a proof-of-concept before using Cypress.io
[36:05] Walmyr’s advice for how to get started with Cypress.io

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🔗 Walmyr on LinkedIn (https://bit.ly/2XA4h1J)
🔗 Walmyr's website (https://bit.ly/33y5Ukw)
🔗 Walmyr's Udemy courses (https://bit.ly/33yw5rg)
🔗 Walmyr's book, Protractor (https://bit.ly/33xBFtG)

At our final Future of Fintech fireside chat, we spoke to Razaq Ahmed, the Co-Founder and CEO of Cowrywise about how FinTech can empower everyone – including first time users of financial services – to save and invest. He shares more about how the YC company – that has over 100 000 downloads of its investment app – is working to grow opportunities for all generations in Nigeria, Africa and beyond.

Watch the video, or check out the blog post here! (https://bit.ly/2XuhdGy)

While establishing their product-market fit, Primephonic worked with a dev agency to spin up and trial different features of their product. Once it took off, however, they realised that they would need a dedicated in-house team to keep growing and improving their product — migrating code, as well as a lot of the contextual knowledge across the teams, turned out to be a major challenge. Here’s how Henrique Boregio, Primephonic’s CTO, navigated this.

Watch the video and read the blog post here! (https://bit.ly/3f49Yeg)

In our latest fireside chat, we spoke to Lyndon Subroyen, Global Head of Digital & Technology at Investec, about how FinTech partnerships help drive digital transformation and innovation at the global asset management company.

Find out more about how Lyndon is thinking about the future of FinTech in Africa and beyond in this episode!

You can also watch the video, or read the transcript, here! (https://bit.ly/32KoSUn)

Leonard Mahlangu, Tech Recruitment Consultant at Investec, believes that building a human connection with candidates is important for a ‘high-touch’ hiring approach. In light of COVID-19, the team had to move their recruitment process online, and this meant they had to figure out how to keep human connection a priority through a completely virtual interaction.

This is a summary of our conversation with Leonard about his team’s experience, and the three key lessons he’s learned about tech hiring in a remote-first world.

Watch the video interview, and read the blog post, here! (https://bit.ly/2CrmTK9)