[a2tech]

Working with a client just last month that hired an African engineering group to build a tool for them. What they got delivered was a Next.js train wreck that was so coupled to Vercel's hosting that I couldn't make it run successfully anywhere else. The customer was a non-profit and didn't want to/couldn't afford Vercel's hosting so asked if I could try and make it run and I (naively) thought 'its just javascript, it should run anywhere!' and I took a run at it.

After a week of futzing with it I just threw up my hands and said 'no can do'. I couldn't untangle the spaghetti JS and piles of libraries. 'Compiling' would complete and if you looked at the output it was clearly missing tons of bits but never threw an error. Just tons of weirdness from the toolchain to the deployment platform.

[Kye]

I haven't heard anything about trends, stereotypes, positives, and negatives regarding IT and development in Africa. Following HN's guideline to increase curiosity as topics get more divisive (as this subthread has), and looking for "the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says" I'm going to assume the best:

What's the story here? I assume this group was chosen for a reason and didn't meet expectations.

[a2tech]

The non-profit works in Africa and is all about using local resources when at all possible. They knew some people that worked with a group out of Nairobi that talked a good game and they liked the people they met and the non-profit folks are NOT technical, they jumped on it. It's a classic story really--I've been on this side of the table many times before with outsourced work.

If they had brought me in before hand I could have saved them a lot of work by asking the hard questions and reigning in the tech overspend.

[arcfour]

"We don't know a lot about this, what could go wrong?!" Sigh...

[a2tech]

They're sweet well meaning people. They're very familiar with the realities of working in Africa, but they always assume people will try and do the right thing at the end of the day.

[BobaFloutist]

"We don't know a lot about this, let's hire some experts to handle it for us"

[snickerdoodle12]

Why accept the result? Send it back and have them deliver something usable.

[a2tech]

It was running when they accepted it. However they didn't realize that the group was running the Django/Postgres 'backend' on a managed Digital Ocean instance, then there were two different Vercel 'projects'. It was costing hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month to run for a project that was VERY lightly used.

They paid them on the strength of seeing it working, but then the consulting group basically ghosted when the customer asked to adjust it to run on cheaper hosting (probably because they couldn't), then the site got shut off because the hosting was all in the consulting groups name and they stopped paying it. Digital Ocean nuked the database for non-payment and they lost tons and tons of manual work putting in data.

[snickerdoodle12]

Damn, what a horror story

[a2tech]

I felt really bad for them. They're super nice people and I don't think the contractors set out to take advantage of them, it ended up being an bad experience for everyone.