Developer Days offer R35,000 to winner

Hosted by Deloitte Digital South Africa and Tech4Africa, in association with Nedbank, the winning contender walks away with R35,000 in cash, compliments of Nedbank.

"These events will be an engaging experience designed to test the skills of the attending developers. Nedbank will expose certain data sources, which the developers will use to come up with a solution," says Andre Hugo, director, Deloitte Digital.

"We are delighted to be part of this groundbreaking initiative, which forms part of the banks' key strategic business drivers to lead in digital banking and provide easy-to-do banking, anytime, anywhere. The face of digital banking is changing and we believe banks need to continue investing in innovation and partnering with the best developers to find game changing solutions," says Ciko Thomas, managing executive of consumer banking at Nedbank.

Groups, workshops, chill zones

A group participation structure will be followed to encourage networking between the contenders. Groups will vary in size from a minimum of two to a maximum of five developers.

"Aimed at giving techies a place to meet new people, try out new ideas, challenge themselves on problems and generally geek out, these will not be your typical developer workshops with ties and a death by power point. We want to encourage speed, execution, new ideas, new technology and disruption. There are no boundaries, no stack predilections and no rules," says Gareth Knight, founder at Tech4Africa.

Co-sponsors that include IBM, Thoughtworks and Google will conduct workshops and other activities during the DevDays to provide participants with the tools that will assist them in deploying their solutions.

Developers can expect the problem set to include tech, which requires a mobile frontend using HTML5, Android app and/or feature phone; a web based backend with a web datastore; and messaging APIs, which do push & pull requests.

Entry is R250 per developer. This includes snacks, drinks and meals. Attendees will also get a R250 discount on their Tech4Africa conference registration later in the year. WiFi connectivity, programming space, case studies, demo facilities, a chill zone and Raspberry Pi will be provided. Developers just need to bring their notebooks and problem-solving creativity.

For more, view the Johannesburg event or the Cape Town event.