Nana Ghartey’s voice assistant software may have started out in his grandmother’s house, but it’s now being used by the thousands of older and visually-impaired people all over Ghana excluded by Western voice technology. How did he get into tech? Ghartey taught himself mobile app development and built desktop applications, websites, and eventually mobile games, none of which were part of his school curriculum, by reading the programming textbooks that an uncle visiting from the US had left behind. Here’s his story. In 2010, the wealthiest American tech companies had
ANJEL Tech, a Black-owned cloud-based application that turns any smartphone into your personal body cam, has announced a historic partnership with 1 Million Madly Motivated Moms (1M4), an organization led by African American moms to address police brutality through legal action and legislative policy education. We previously interviewed the founder of ANJEL Tech, who told POCIT that he’d struggled to get attention from mainstream reporters and investors when it came to his app. The app in question has been described as an initiative that “could help protect minorities.” When activated, the
Nia Asemota is a self-taught programmer interning at NASA as a software engineer. Despite being 21-years-old, Nia has dozens of accolades behind her back. From collaborating with Black Girls CODE as a technical instructor, being a Game Design TA at the City College of New York’s free STEM Institute to launching her own kid’s book about Black woman engineers. She’s doing it all. But her journey has not been as smooth sailing as some might assume, as she’s had to navigate being one of just a few girls in her
HoneyComb is hiring on Pocitjobs Alayshia Knighten is a seasoned DevOps Engineer with a love of infrastructure and a focus on breaking down technical learning barriers for customers. She recently spoke to POCIT about navigating life in the tech sector as a woman of color and her role at Honeycomb, an observability tool that lets developers quickly make sense of the billions of rows of data needed to fully represent the user experience in your complex and unpredictable systems. Since joining Honeycomb as a Senior Implementation Engineer in October 2020,
“Anyone can make music on their PC now,” laments DJ Sumbody of Ayepyep, Ngwana Daddy and Monate Mpolaye fame. “You don’t have to go to the studio. You get a program, you do beats. If they can master it, it’s a track, it’s out there. It’s simple now.” While preceding genres and music movements have taken advantage of the ready availability of software that can be purchased or digitally cracked to mimic a physical studio, amapiano has been the most radical departure from established and entrenched ways of making, marketing,
Amber Shand, a former junior Software Engineer at American Express currently working at Cybsafe as a front-end engineer and Jessie Auguste, a colleague and fellow engineer, sat down with POCIT to talk about their journey, the challenges, triumphs and more. When previously asked about what inspired her journey, Shand said in a blog post: “It all started in 2018; I was doing a Mergers and Acquisitions internship in Madrid. I had big ambitions about working at the Big 4 (PwC, KPMG, EY, and Deloitte) once I had graduated but had
Emtech, a Black female owned central bank digital infrastructure provider, targets emerging markets where payments infrastructure need aligning with digital innovations — to improve efficiency, introduce new products and services that are likely to promote financial inclusion, and in ensuring the secure movement of money.
Using his experience from working at Google, Anthony Mays says he is hoping to bring others in the door by giving accessible tips, one-on-one mentorship, and interview help. His drive for wanting more diversity within the tech industry came after he had spent his first year at Google as a software engineer in 2013. In that same year – the company publicly released its diversity numbers for the first time. He knew the numbers were likely low, but he didn’t realize just how bad they were. It seems that Silicon Valley has
