Polymorph Software Developer, Jaco du Plooy, attended the sixth annual DevConf in Johannesburg on 7 April 2022 and connected with many brilliant local developers. The conference brought the South African developer community together and boasted more than 30 talented speakers and over 450 attendees. This one-day conference created a community-driven, professional software developer-focused space for technical talks, workshops, panel discussions, and much more. It provided software developers with a buffet of tools, practices, and principles which they can use to tackle current and future challenges in the South African software development environment. It’s an event where attendees can learn, network and be inspired regardless of their specific technology stack and programming language of choice.
The Great Myth: Software Engineering Teams
The keynote speaker, Mandla Magagula, opened the conference with an inspiring talk about software engineering. Specifically, he proposed an alternative to traditional software engineering teams that draws from an age-old agricultural approach to team design and management.
5 Tracks with more than 30 speakers
Further contributions included technology leader, Tanaka Mutakwa, whose contribution focused on “Making the Leap into Technology Leadership” and Cliff de Wit who presented an interesting take on “Advance home automation: A deeper dive into how you can automate your smart life”. Andreas Nel further touched on a subject that is very close to Polymorph’s heart namely “How we successfully run a fully-remote, autonomous team”.
Philip Joubert, Co-founder and CEO at OfferZen, talked about the “State of the Developer Nation: What’s it like to be a developer in South Africa in 2022?” His talk focused on answering questions such as: What are South African developers being paid at different stages of their career? What do developers want in a new job? How do South African developers level up?
Based on this talk, Jaco noted that in 2021, many senior developers resigned from their jobs in favour of taking up remote jobs more suitable to their lifestyle and location. Time zones were a large consideration in this change. South Africa and particularly the Western Cape is an ideal destination for digital nomad software developers due to the small time difference between Europe and South Africa.
DevConf 2023 is definitely on the Polymorph agenda!
For more insights about remote work, download this year’s annual State of the Software Developer Nation report here.
We are currently looking for a senior software engineer to join our team. If you are interested, please have a look at the available job position below.
