Hey people!
I have to say that I'm impressed and glad to see such an avid group of software heads in Nigeria. I'm a Software Engineering student(senior year) from the U.S. BlackBelt region with primary focus on gamedesign/development. That said I work in my Univeristies Engineering IT department so I've done a whole lot of other software things as well.

It's nice to see such a talent pool here in nigeria. I've recently come to the realisation that I have no desire to work for other people when I graduate and that few things outstanding that African Americans have done here in the states came from working at someone elses company. It always grows out of the comunity first then makes an impact on the rest of society.

Hopefully I'll be able to work with some of yall or use your products in the future. I've recently come across the work of a kenyan programmer named John paul chacha who made a topnotch alternative tool to Photoshop called Chasys Draw IES. If you haven't seen it check it out, or at least check him out.


Things I'm currently working on or thinking about:
1. A basic gameplay mechanic I want to use on a board game(browser based & physical). 8X8 boa(oware) setup where 4 men(seeds) can occupy a pit at a time. If a pit is occupied by opposing seeds a defense phase is started that has an underline rock-paper-scissors element to it. I'm just designing the details now. I want something simple enough to remember so that it can be played anywhere and with fundamentls strong enough to expand upon later. The simple version is for board game while the expanded version is for the browser game(no need for player to remember the rules or keep track of complex changes in state)

2. African history mapping website where a simple SVG map frontend is imployed for users to scale in and out to a place/area or move forward and backward in time while reading and overlaying it with data points that signify importent points in history. Each data point would have a backend that consist of a forum atmosphere where people laydown and interpret sources that pertains to the data point. The datapoint itself would be the current consensus on that historic event. Basically graphically maping out various aspects of history. Migration paterns, military conquest/failures, economic patterns(trade routs, mining zone, etc). The central theme would be the tracking and proccessing of...
___ a. Mayudukwa(Kongo term: Generational collectivly accumulated wealth)
___ b. Sankofa(Akan/Asanti term: Build with todays knowledge, aware of knowledge from the past)
These two would work under the basic physics toolbox of Dynamics - "Total force = Sum of all forces"
I.E (Problem)Total force can be changed with (Sankofa)altering the problematic individual forces by way of (Mayudukwa)first identifying all individual forces.

So I'd like to first work on a web based knowledge center aspect(Mayudukwa) and later a web based action aspect(Sankofa) for African people world wide and subseqently all people period.


3. A "watch this" website were people can send each other custom simple webpages with content tailored to a particular person you know. This is as opposed to a blog environment where you have one central webpage where you post content for a generic blog audience. Basically When you logon to "watch this" your home page would be a "custom made website" that consist of an aggregation of all the custom pages your friends sent you to watch.

4. Other boring things such as working on my development pipline, along with a couple of other game related things I don't want to talk about just yet.

You can still achieve your goal in developing your own applications and at the same time be working for a good company where you will get better training, exposure to new technologies which will help you to solidify your knowledge.

RandomAfricanAm:

2. African history mapping website where a simple SVG map frontend is imployed for users to scale in and out to a place/area or move forward and backward in time while reading and overlaying it with data points that signify importent points in history. Each data point would have a backend that consist of a forum atmosphere where people laydown and interpret sources that pertains to the data point. The datapoint itself would be the current consensus on that historic event. Basically graphically maping out various aspects of history. Migration paterns, military conquest/failures, economic patterns(trade routs, mining zone, etc). The central theme would be the tracking and proccessing of...
___ a. Mayudukwa(Kongo term: Generational collectivly accumulated wealth)
___ b. Sankofa(Akan/Asanti term: Build with todays knowledge, aware of knowledge from the past)
These two would work under the basic physics toolbox of Dynamics - "Total force = Sum of all forces"
I.E (Problem)Total force can be changed with (Sankofa)altering the problematic individual forces by way of (Mayudukwa)first identifying all individual forces.

So I'd like to first work on a web based knowledge center aspect(Mayudukwa) and later a web based action aspect(Sankofa) for African people world wide and subseqently all people period.

I had a similar thought but I was leaning towards news about current events, a tree like representation of current events:
a website where each user is allowed to share information but every information can be linked visually to another information possibly shared by another user thereby creating the impression of a tree.
example:
a news that Chinua Achebe is dead can have "child−news" of tributes to Achebe and news about reactions from Nigerians concerning his death.
if you have seen a visual representation of a binary search tree or a heap.
.
.
I was developing a restful web service for this until I had a cooler idea and paused its development

lordZOUGA:
I had a similar thought but I was leaning towards news about current events, a tree like representation of current events:
a website where each user is allowed to share information but every information can be linked visually to another information possibly shared by another user thereby creating the impression of a tree.
example:
a news that Chinua Achebe is dead can have "child−news" of tributes to Achebe and news about reactions from Nigerians concerning his death.
if you have seen a visual representation of a binary search tree or a heap.
.
.
I was developing a restful web service for this until I had a cooler idea and paused its development

Sounds good!
I looked at it as being all encomposing especially considering it has the second sankofa "action component" relatd to changing the future. To put it simply I view news as "history in the making" or current/present history. So thats included as well. Though the two approaches complement each other in that this service does not report all news stories but the synthesis of them.

To expand your example:
There might be 30 articles that - "Chinua Achebe is dead"
25 articles of "child−news" of tributes to Achebe and...
33 articles of news about reactions from Nigerians concerning his death.

Those aggregate articles your service pulls together might paint a picture that one CNN article alone can't. Which is where the synthesis comes into play. Hopefully an accurate user based synthesis and most importantly it's impact on society is what my service would provide.

As for the visual tree structure you might like this. Don't miss:0:30-0:55

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LIdPOZGoDE

csharpjava: You can still achieve your goal in developing your own applications and at the same time be working for a good company where you will get better training, exposure to new technologies which will help you to solidify your knowledge.

I completely agree.
It's just not the move I want to make at this time ...and while I have no issues working with others I certainly don't want to get too comfortable working on someone elses ideas.

A side issue is that my focus is game design & development which means I'd have to leave my community to find work. I want to use my education to contribute to where I grew up. I'm thinking of opening a training center in my old neighborhood to teach basic programming skills along with game design & development principles.

I break software up into three basic disiplines(In a nut shell)
Computer science - Interface with hardware in the most efficient manor possible creating a basic reliable tool kit(library) for software engineers and programmers to accomplish allotted tasks.
Software Engineer - Assess the overarching needs of a project versus whats available to the team. Afterwared design the abstract structure/model that the programming team will follow.
Programmer - Follow out the design laid down by the software engineers via the tool set(libray) provided by the computer scientist

While Computer Science and Software Engineering is one thing; I can teach an 8th grader to be a programmer(use libraries & follow a design). I want to use a YMCA model. People pay a monthly membership fee to use your equipment. At certain times of the day an instructer gives lessons on various topics. Afterwards your free to practice on your own useing the equipment on hand. Basicly when I'm not instructing I can work on my own projects and hopefully employ some of my students to help on those projects or if they have ideas of their own we could work on theirs. I could at the least support them.

I also see the ability to suppliment this with a basic 2D/3D Modeling & Animation set up using wicon pads along with a sound studio to teach music production. Of course they could also use the facility to make & showcase their own music, software, art, etc.

Great example!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEHu6GSY0YA

@RandomAfricanAm, I saw the video. that kind of navigation requires high−end gpu to be able to render that fast and smooth. an average user's PC might not be able to handle it. it is a nice concept.

lordZOUGA: @RandomAfricanAm, I saw the video. that kind of navigation requires high−end gpu to be able to render that fast and smooth. an average user's PC might not be able to handle it. it is a nice concept.

Valid concern.

But if you look back at 2:05 - 2:45 you'll see the tech running on a PSP and thats some OLD tech right there. I'd assume any modern Android based phone would be able to pull that off let alone a modern PC with a decent integrated AMD video setup. To the extent that it's still questionable just look at it component wise. Even without high resolution images all it's doing is overlaying one image with a window/link to another. It's not as it seems(one big image that you can constantly zoom in on).

It just loads a new window into a designated place when you zoom in on the area. Afterwards the user simply zooms in on a given window. There's probably only 2-3 layers of windows active/rendered at any given time. on the PSP it looked like only one was ative and a new window only opens up when you get close enough(probably a ram issue more then any thing)