Rufaro Madamombe - Zimbabwean Software Engineer
Channel: Story Untold ZW🇿🇼
Date: 2022-07-08

#webdevelopment #RufaroMadamombe #storyuntoldzw
In Episode 11 of The Story Untold we sat down with self-taught developer Rufaro Madamombe. Prior to joining Human Made, Rufaro was a Technical Lead engineer at Techzim. 

He started his professional development journey in 2014 as a self directed learner. In 2017, he joined Techzim initially as a content writer covering technology & business news in Zimbabwe & across Africa. Then not too long after that, Rufaro transitioned to development work creating the site’s custom WordPress theme & plugins for the best reader experience. 

In 2018, the business transitioned it’s revenue generation model to be e-commerce driven and as such Rufaro found himself with new challenges to solve. These challenges ranged from integrating with third party APIs to customising WooCommerce buying experience to be as simple and intuitive for Zimbabwean customers. He has also built customer buying and content consumption experiences on mobile as well as WhatsApp by leveraging technologies like WordPress and Google Cloud.

In September 2021, Rufaro joined Human Made to share his unique engineering experience & learn from an amazing team building at a large scale.

In this episode we talk about the following;
- Rufaro discovering he wanted to be a developer,
- Not pursuing tertiary education and instead self-learning via the internet,
- The projects he's worked on throughout his career,
- Striking a work-life balance'
- and more...

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Intro 0:00
Working with people in different regions across the world 1:49
Human Made 2:38
Getting into tech at 16 4:20 
Choosing not to go to University 12:04
Getting my first job - building websites 17:08
Preferring web development over Java 22:48
Becoming a Techzim writer 26:12
Going back to code: Website maintenance, improvement & eCommerce 31:41
Upskilling whilst working 33:31
Work-life balance 36:40
Working remotely for a global tech startup 43:27

#Zimbabweanentrepreneurs #entrepreneurs #zimentrepreneurs #entrepreneurship #zimcreatives #zimcontent #zimcontentcreators