Hey there 👋,

This week I heard that Elon Musk is not interested in buying TikTok and there were some big discussions in Italy around the future of AI. Nevertheless, some amazing stuff happened right here in South Africa which I am excited to share once again. I spent some time this week getting to know Flutter a bit better and I quickly realised that building a real chat app is not as easy as that one video on YouTube said. I also learned that much like how many Gautengers who migrated to Cape Town are now migrating back to Gauteng, many companies who migrated to the cloud are migrating back to on-premises… not sure how I feel about that.

Enjoy the letter 🚀.

LAUNCH

✈️ Sim Flights Tracker

Sim Flights Tracker is a mobile application built by Donald Sepeng designed to monitor live virtual flights on the VATSIM and IVAO networks. It provides users with detailed flight information, including the total number of active flights and various related data points. The app features a custom map that displays the real-time locations of aircraft during their journeys. It boasts some incredible features, including

• Live flight tracking, flights map, and flight following.

• Live Air Traffic controller information.

• Airport information.

• Live airport METAR information.

• VATSIM events calendar with notifications.

• VATSIM flights log for previous 100 flights.

This app was built using Flutter, Java & Firebase, however the database is Mongo Atlas. Users can download the app on iOS and Android and watch out for upcoming features including more languages and IVAO events and flights log.

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 🙌.

BANKING

🔐 Capitec Feature Lock

Feature Lock is a new feature on the Capitec app that enables users to lock features they don’t use as often. When unlocking a feature, you will have to wait 4 hours before the feature is unlocked. This is an attempt at slowing down fraud by introducing a delay. With feature lock, users can swipe left on their transact menu to lock a feature and then unlock a feature through biometrics, sealing the deal by taking a selfie after 4 hours.

PERSONAL FINANCE

💰 Saziso’s Budget Tracker

The Budget Tracker is a web-based application, built by Saziso, designed to help you manage your finances by setting a budget and tracking your expenses. It provides a simple interface where you can enter your total available funds, add expenses, and monitor your remaining balance in real time. You can also

• Set a budget - You can enter your total budget in the designated field and the application will store the amount as the available budget.

• Add an expense - You can enter an expense, for example groceries and the amount spent. Clicking on Add Expense will subtract the amount from the total budget.

• Validate expenses - If you try to add an expense that exceeds the remaining budget, you will be presented with an error message. The app also prevents empty or invalid inputs.

• Real-time budget updates - Ever time a new expense is added, the remaining balance is automatically updated. If the budget is then exceeded, a warning will be displayed.

• Displaying expenses - Expenses which you add will be listed on the screen with their names and amounts. You can then review your spending at a glance.

You can continue to add expenses until your budget runs out and by tracking your expenses, you can make informed financial decisions. Saziso has future plans to implement local storage support, enabling you to save your budget between sessions and also introduce graphs and charts, with more features including

• Expense categories

• Exporting data

• Dark mode

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.

• Entelect Retrospectives - Apparently there is a 50/50 split between pizza and burgers at Entelect. I don’t know.. sounds rigged.

• Indie Hacker Meetups - Meet up with fellow developers and entrepreneurs once a month in Cape Town.

MEME