Hey there 👋,

While America is going through the growing pains of giving Elon Musk too much power and South Africa had a minor throwback to ESP, many developers in South Africa have done some amazing work, which I am excited to share. I am also excited to share with you LaunchWeek, my new project for 2025.

Enjoy the letter 🚀.

LAUNCH

📈 Capitec App HealthCheck

Capitec app users can now easily see whether their favourite banking app is currently having some issues by visiting the all new Capitec App HealthCheck. This project let’s users access historical and realtime data on the app’s health, whether it is currently up or down.

• The HealthCheck currently relies on login requests from three different cities.

• It uses ThousandEyes under the hood to trace any network issues.

• While it seems like JHB has a random spike every now and then, the average response time for Capitec’s app is around 200ms.

Looking forward, Business Bank users can expect to see their data here as well.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

🏦 Investec Developer Platform

Any developer will have thought to themselves, “I could have built that better” and if you ever opened your banking app and thought “I could build a better banking app”, then you need to look into Investec’s Developer platform. With the platform, you can

• Access to your card transactions

• Set up custom budgeting and notifications

• Limit spending on products

• And more!

If this sounds like something you want to get in to, send me a message to get the ball rolling 🙌.

FITNESS & HEALTH

🤸🏻‍♂️ Vitality Fitness

Discovery Vitality is redefining fitness with Vitality Fitness, an innovative platform built right into the Discovery app. Now the major topic here is that you can book gym classes or gym day passes at the smaller gym - meaning not just Planet Fitness or Virgin Active - without needing a membership to the facility. With the app, you can also:

• Search for fitness facilities by location and type of exercise.

• Book and pay for classes right in the app.

• Scan the facility’s QR code to get Vitality points.

This was a huge and successful initiative with multiple teams involved and while the feature is currently live, there are already updates in progress.

COMMUNITY

🚀 LaunchWeek

South Africa has some amazing developers and many of the work done by them go unnoticed. Everyday, products are launched, bugs are squashed and features are released, yet there is no single source of truth for developers to share their work.

Until now.

LaunchWeek is a weekly newsletter that shares launches, feature releases and articles done by fellow South African developers. I want to celebrate the work that South African developers have done, whether it is pushing a feature for a big company like Capitec Bank or launching your own side-project. I want to share it with South Africa.

How can you share your work on LaunchWeek? Easy! Send an email to [email protected] with the details and we will slot it in the next issue. Then, you can easily share the email with your mom to show her you actually know what you are doing!

COMMERCIAL BREAK

🙌 Entelect is hiring

Entelect Software has taken Sunday Times’s Best Place to Work 2024 and the great thing is that they are hiring! Especially Java engineers but they also have roles open for mobile developers, JavaScript developers and .NET developers. Reach out to us for more information on how you can potentially join this great company.

VNEXT

👀 What to look out for

Here are some articles I found to be very interesting along with some nice tools you might want to use for your next project.

• Hypermedia Systems - These guys are really passionate about building websites the way they are meant to be built.

• Posthog - Apparently an all-in-one tool for building a SaaS app and it is completely FREE for a single project.

• Testing Legacy JavaScript - Sometimes you land a legacy project, but you still need to write some tests for it.

MEME