Climate Change Hackathon Winner

Hackathon winner

👋🏾 Salaam, we are Somalis in Tech and welcome to our monthly newsletter. Each month we’ll bring you the latest from the community, tech news and a community Q&A. 

October’s been a busy month 😅 we’re coming off the back of our annual Hackathon- an exciting weekend filled with coding, community and creativity. We’ve provided a run-down of the weekend for you below. 

Somalis in Tech’s Virtual Hackathon: Climate Change 

As you know, we just held our grand finale of the hackathon and what a show it was!

This year's hackathon focused on developing tech solutions to support the fight against Climate Change in the Horn of Africa. Safe to say, the teams didn’t disappoint. We saw some amazing solutions, like an app tackling waste disposal and an SMS web app designed to reduce food waste. From Warsame Waste to Xalimo Thunberg - we were blown away by the creativity and innovation teams displayed this weekend. 

Whilst they all did amazingly well, there was one team that had that extra bit of sauce and so we’d like to congratulate Team 4 - Somalia Trees who showed off a working demo of their platform where you can purchase a tree planted by a local farmer. Big shout out to 

• Abdilmajide Ali

• Abdirizak Obsiye

• Muhammad Abdillahi 

• Sakariya Mohamed

• Salma Mohamed

You can check out their website here: www.somaliatrees.com

Amal Hussein, principal software engineer at Indigo joined us as a judge and panellist, and did an excellent job livening up the event with her feedback.

Our Hackathon's aim was to connect the community to solve real problems and provide an opportunity for our members to double down on their existing skills and even pick up a new thing or two to add to their repertoire. 

This weekend we’ve been joined by several guest speakers who have led workshops for participants. We’d like to thank them for their time and advice. 

• Yasmin Sidat, Product Manager @ Open Money

• Muntasir Syed, Senior Engineer @ Scoodle & Co-founder @ DeenDevelopers

• Ismael Jeilani, Co-founder @ Scoodle

• Yusuf Ahmed, Regional Director for East Africa @ Islamic Relief

You can watch the finale and team presentations below.👇🏾

Become a mentor

A big thank you to all those who applied to be a mentor! We are now planning to roll out the programme more widely.

When one of us succeeds, we all win! Help us on our journey to uplift each other and push for more Somali representation in the tech industry. 

We’d like prospective mentors to fill out this application. Our community relies upon us exchanging knowledge and mutual support. Please do take the time to fill out the form - it only takes 5 minutes! If you would like more information on mentoring, and why you should do it, here are 5 reasons. 

Upcoming events

Software engineering careers at GDS for under-represented groups (UK based)

If you are interested in finding out what it's like to work as a developer, frontend developer, site reliability engineer or technical architect at GDS, please join us!

Tuesday 9th November 12pm-1pm GMT

Wednesday 17th November 17:30 - 18:30 GMT

Sign up here: Eventbrite

Content shared by the community

1. Watch: Climate Change Hackathon Finale shared by SiT

2. Read: 4 Tech jobs for people who don’t code shared by Ali Ibrahim

3. Listen: Quran.Cafe built by Mohamud Mussa  

Mahadsanid,

SiT Team