Why do we need a Tanzania developer survey ?

Hi, This is Kalebu, It's has been quite a while but yes here I am again, As you might have guessed today I'm not going to be talking about a chatbots or sarufi but more of developer communities.

Starting out as self-taught developer, communities played a big role on where I am now and am super passionate about them, I remember back in the days when I started learning Python and began to run some  code in a jupyter notebook, I saw myself as an alchemist and thought I'm the only Machine Learning engineer in the country only to realise there so many others some far ahead doing cool interesting stuffs, It was an ego check, humbling but at the same time gave me  chance to really learn a lot from the rest of the practitioners which really helped me through out my career.

Enough about me, There so many young people (not necessarily young) from all corners of Tanzania who are doing cool stuffs, some are at the beginning of their journey and don't know where to start or what to learn or asking themselves existential questions like Am I Alone ? Sometimes you hear all these stories like There are no developers(or very few) in Tanzania and so and so, But why is this ? Can we make it better ?

"In God we trust, all others must bring data." – W. Edwards Deming

As I said above from my few years experience with  Tanzania developer community, I'm lucky to be a part of so many developers initiatives from Python to Javascript to Golang to GDG to DevC  and so on,  some having over 800+ devs but all of this not well aggregated which really under represent our tech landscape and make it difficulties for people who are building developer products like myself, It reaches a point you're wondering whether to prioritise a Python SDK or PHP SDK and the problem comes there is not actual data to backup your decision so you just improvise.

Can we make it better ?

Yes I believe so, our approach is "You can't improve what you can't measure" so we just launched the very first Tanzania Developer survey aimed to help map the tech ecosystem, It's anonymous survey so you don't have to worry about sharing your Name or Email and The results of the survey will be publicly published so anyone will be able to use the outcome of the survey to understand better about the Tanzanian Ecosystem, whether it's developer community leaders or you're just looking to find what others are doing or you're building developer tools targeting developers.

How can you be a part of it ?

Survey won't be a good representation of the Tanzanian Tech landscape if only two or ten people participate that's why we really need contribution in making this work,  You can help this initiative by doing the following;

1. Participate in the Survey by filling the Tanzania Developer Survey only takes less than 10 minutes of your time.
2. Share the survey with as many as developers as you can
3. Share About the survey on socials (X, WhatsApp Groups, Linkedin ) and so
4. Well that's all

Thank you so much for taking your time to go through this article, You could be doing 10 other things, I highly appreciate and I hope you grabbed something from it and will take your time to support the initiative, Gracias.