In a chat with Daser David, the brain behind Hack Jos, the first hackathon to be organized in Northern Nigeria, he predicted that the city of Jos is the best place for a start-ups in Nigeria.
David Daser has been developing software for about 13 years and is the IT Consultant for the Nigerian Air Force at the moment. Talking about what inspired the Jos Hackathon, David says; “I learnt programming from the streets, I am a Biochemistry graduate. I wasn’t in the class having some boring Computer Science lecturers trying to teach me how to code or something like that…”
With that, David takes us back to his university days where they formed a group in the University of Jos called ‘UJ Geeks’, which were a group of people that come together to share coding ideas, tips and knowledge. So as a group, they made it a thing to observe Software Freedom Day, a global event to celebrate Open Source and Linux. After school, David got a 4 bedroom flat that became the goto place for techies which helped him in becoming a better programmer. Thi sparked the idea of throwing people together to write code which came in form of the hackathon called Hack Jos. He plans to make Jos the home of software developers
Asked why Jos as opposed to Yaba, Lagos, David says Lagos and even Abuja, are very busy places. There are places where one should sell applications instead of making them. He goes on to explain how Jos is a place that is easy to live in, with the best weather conditions in the country. The challenges he has had with bringing people to Jos is the notion that Jos is a ‘code red’ area which discourages people from far away to come work in Jos.
But he believes the notion will change.
