Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

In this week's episode, our hosts talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow including what they got right, what they got very wrong, and what we can learn. Also listen to hear "Grandpa Joel" tell stories about the Xerox Alto.

There’s blood in the water. Nigerian lawmakers are flexing their might with a confidence rarely seen in decades past— at least as far as taking large corporates to task for flouting regulations. According to some media reports a member of the Nigerian Senate has put forward a motion for the house to investigate MTN Nigeria’s potential collusion with leading commercial banks to facilitate the illegal repatriation of funds over the last ten years. MTN is being accused of sneaking just under $14 billion out of the Nigerian market, and despite MTN’s official declarations of innocence, lawmakers have vowed to investigate the matter thoroughly. And so MTN’s season of reckoning continues. Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up, net neutrality activists around the world are celebrating the USA handing over internet control to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) over the weekend. This happened in the wake of a US federal judge denying a last ditch request made by Republican Senator Ted Cruz and other politicians for an injunction to try and prevent the scheduled hand-over taking place over the weekend. Tune in for more on that story as well as more of the week’s leading headlines from across Africa and beyond. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Show notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep30.md recorded September 30th, 2016 Sound Cloud | Video Topics Laravel Forge adds a new development blog DigitalOcean and Github Hacktoberfest Symfony Reaches 500 Million Downloads Bugsnag adds support for seeing what happens before an exception is thrown Vue 2.0 released Linux kernel security needs a rethink PHP 7.1.0 Release Candidate 3 Released Apache Spot uses AI to filter network traffic Why are you not taking LSD to improve your work performance? Would you take LSD to give you a boost at work? SpaceX Interplanitary Transport Announced

In this week's episode, our hosts give updates on what's happening with Stack Overflow Documentation and the new Stack Overflow Constitution. They also argue about what to do with a time machine.

In a week which saw Yahoo announce that it had suffered the worst cyber-breach in history, and all three of Egypt’s incumbent mobile telcos opting not to bid for the 4G licenses being floated by the Egyptian government, Kenyan solar company, D.Light, shone brightly by announcing that they had raised $22.5 million in funding from leading VC’s, debt financiers and non-profit organisations. The money will be used to grow D.Light’s PayGo business globally— a pay-as-you-go offering which enables low-income customers to buy solar products on credit. D.Light has already made its mark by delivering affordable solar-powered solutions in Africa, China, South Asia and the United States. The company has so far sold more than twelve million solar light and power products in 62 countries, and aims to light up the lives of 100 million people by 2020. In this week’s episode of the African Tech Round-up, Nicholus, one of our US-based listeners, shares insights he gleaned at Intercommunity— the Internet Society’s annual global membership meeting which took place across various live locations around the world last week. Nicholus attended one of the sessions held in Washington DC, and emailed us a report via audio note which touched on why some US lawmakers are continuing to challenge the merits of allowing internet governance to shift from the United States to the international body, ICANN. Also in this week’s show is a conversation Andile Masuku had with the four co-founders of a promising South African start-up called Airbuy— a business which plans to help people convert airtime into “airbucks” that they can use to purchase goods and services online. The chaps are still celebrating their recent win at an MIT Global Startup Labs competition hosted at Wits University, and they let me take a peek under the hood of their passionate entrepreneurial hustle. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Show notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep29.md Topics Troubleshooting Laravel Valet on macOS Sierra link DesignPatternsPHP Microsoft’s the top open-source contributor on GitHublink Github Octoverse 2016 Calyx 30GB/month 4G Hotspot for $400/year link The hosts Eric Van Johnson Tom Rideout John Congdon Follow us on Twitter @PHPUgly Email us at Podacast@phpugly.com Sponsor of this show: The DiegoDev Group

Show Notes: https://github.com/PHPUgly/podcast/blob/master/shows/ep28.md Topics SDPHP and SDLUG Meetups Laravel Spark v2 is now released The GitHub Universe Laravel Shift - 1,000 applications upgraded Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet The hosts Eric Van Johnson Twitter / Github / Blog / About.me Tom Rideout Twitter / Github / About.me John Congdon Twitter / Github Follow us on Twitter @PHPUgly Email us at Podacast@phpugly.com

It’s been a busy week for the continent’s fintech scene. The past week saw MTN South Africa announce that it would be discontinuing its mobile money service due to “a lack of commercial viability”. This revelation comes months after Vodacom South Africa ended it’s catastrophic attempt at copying and pasting Kenya’s M-Pesa magic. Meanwhile, Madagascar became only the second African country after Tanzania to to roll out mobile money interoperability across the country's mobile networks. But easily one of the catchiest headline stories of the past week was about Barclays Africa’s involvement in what’s being celebrated as the very first blockchain verified financial transaction in the world by a major banking institution. The pilot deal between The Seychelles Trading Company Ltd. and Ornua saw the two companies harness a blockchain platform developed by Wave to trade a letter of credit. This transaction has to be Barclays’ most overt show of confidence in the potential of blockchain technology to deliver improved efficiencies in international trade. Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up, is a discussion Andile Masuku had with the Kenyan journalist, Eric Mugendi. Eric is Editor-at-large at iAfrikan.com, and also writes for his Tumbler called Kenyan Longreads. Eric joined Andile on the show to discuss the controversy that unfolded on Twitter around the African Tech Summit happening in London on September 29th. The event’s conspicuously mostly male non-black/non-African speaker list included folks many people in the Twitterverse did not feel were representative of Africa’s tech ecosystem, and also managed to leave out many worthy participants. Andile and Eric unpacked the issues at play. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0