Good morning 👋,

Last night, I attended my first ever tech meetup and I met some really cool people. I also learned that Olarm has a neat office! This week, my time has mainly been split between trying to get that chat feature done, which I mentioned in last week’s issue, and trying to beat the dealer in Black Jack Sandy - I was not successful.

America was a bit more behaved this week with Apple releasing the iPhone 16e and another EV company kicking the bucket. South Africa on the other hand has been crushing it with generating awesome software developers, which I am excited to share with you today!

Enjoy the letter 🚀.

P.s. Have you heard about the asteroid that might hit earth? Its probability is super low, but I found it fascinating that we can track things like this.

LAUNCH

🧑‍🎓 Karabo eLearning App

South African high school students can enhance their learning experience with the Karabo Centre by using the Karabo eLearning App, built by Andries Bingani. This app extends upon the Karabo Centre by providing accessible, high-quality educational resources across key subjects.

• Multiple subjects - The app offers in-depth materials for mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences and accounting.

• Educational resources - Users can access recorded lessons, detailed notes and a rich collection of past exam papers allowing them to practice, test their knowledge and reinforce their understanding of various topics at their own pace.

• Live virtual classes - Users can go beyond the educational resources available and attend live lessons where they can engage with experienced educators in real-time.

The Karabo eLearning App aims to tackle the gaps in South Africa’s educational landscape including making education more accessible, supplementing classroom learning and providing flexible learning options. Some upcoming features include written lessons, downloadable content for offline usage and interactive quizzes.

You can download this amazing piece of work on Android and iOS!

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 🙌.

UP & COMING

♠️ Matthew’s Black Jack Sandy

Matthew Safi is a South African dev who is building some awesome things, one them being Black Jack Sandy. This simple web app lets you play a standard game of Black Jack with a decent UI and easy-to-understand rules. As simple as it may sound, it has kept me entertained for far too long. The app has the following features:

• Choose buy-in - Users can pick their buy-in from a range of options. This will then set the Tokens value of the app, which is your available tokens to bet with.

• Place a bet - Before you can play, you need to bet for the round. You may select from a range of visually appealing poker tokens - which were built using vanilla CSS.

• Hit or Stand - Users can decided whether they want the dealer to add another card to their hand or if they want to stay on what they have. You can bust if your total cards add up to more than 21.

• Win or Lose - If you choose to stand, the game will continue with add cards to the dealer’s hand until a conclusion is reached, e.g. dealer wins or loses.

This app is built using VueJS and vanilla CSS and hosted on Vercel. Some upcoming features include local storage that will enable the user to view their history and win to loss ratio.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

📹 ShootDrop

Built by Tom Radford, ShootDrop enables creators to create asset lists for film shoots. Its database is driven by its users and includes the latest camera, lighting, grips and sound gear. Once you have your list created, you can then easily share it with the rest of the team - making collaboration seamless and effortless.

Tom used an impressive tech stack to build this, including a NodeJS GraphQL API and a MongoDB database. The frontend is NextJS with TailwindCSS, which explains the exceptional visuals you see.

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.

• Coddy - A free, fun and effective way to learn how to code.

• nownownow - Add a /now page to your website to tell people what you are focusing on right now in your life.

• Maccy - The clipboard every Mac user needs.

MEME