Speaker

Dawit Abraham

Dawit Abraham

Qene Technologies, Gebeya | Game Developer, Android Developer, Trainer

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Dawit Abraham is an award-winning Game Developer and Android Application Engineer with a sound background in the fields of Native Android Application Development, Game Development using platforms such as Unity 3D Game Engine, and Artificial Intelligence paradigms such as Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

Dawit works comfortably with Java, C++, C# and Python frameworks. He is skilled in Object Oriented programming and MVC and MVP clean architecture designs. He also has experience working in Scheme.

Dawit is the lead Game Developer on the Kukulu project, a 3D infinite runner game for Android platforms and built using Unity 3D Game Engine. Kukulu is the first 3D mobile game to be released in Ethiopia at its scale. Kukulu game won the 2018 Apps Africa Innovation Award for Best News & Entertainment Solution.

Dawit has collaborated on international projects such as the OpenCog Artificial General Intelligence framework (www.opencog.org). He has also undertaken AI based Android Game Application projects from design to development during his years at iCog-Labs, an Artificial Intelligence Research Lab.

Dawit has a practical experience in agile software development (Scrum, Kanban) and utilizes project collaboration and version control systems (Git) extensively.

Dawit has an enthusiastic interest working on Artificial Intelligence systems. He believes it's vital for Africa to get in the race and maintain a stand as soon as possible. When Dawit is not engineering, he spends his time playing his Begena and Guitar, learning foreign languages, practicing Taekwondo (he has a first-degree black belt), playing chess and reading history books.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • android
  • Game Development
  • Game Design
  • Android & iOS Application Engineering

Launching your app for the African market (The right way)

In 2025, it’s estimated that there will be 690 Million Smartphones, 87% Mobile Broadband Penetration and $150 Billion market in Africa. This untapped digital market has grown exponentially over the past few years. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

This is pretty exciting! However, as a developer, there are some things we might need to do differently in order to make sure our products succeed in this market.

In this session we will discuss payment APIs that utilize mobile money (such as mPesa) and carrier billing to make sure we can reach our target users, we’ll talk about accessibility issues that developers face including how to serve people who can’t speak english, can’t read or write, but still want to use your product (it happens quite a lot and products have come up with interesting solutions) and we’ll debunk some discouraging myths about the market by looking at real data from real products in Africa.

How Automated Testing will make or break your tech startup

There's a saying "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while." I've read it being used to relate developers who don't have automated tests in their projects to blind squirrels. (Both will find bugs/nuts once in a while).

However, I find that this message distracts developers from the true essence of automated tests. It's really not about quality assurance and discovering of bugs. That's the benefit of "Testing". But the "Automated" part is more important. You can imagine Automated Testing as the process of building a robot (Let's call him Baymax) that sits down and goes through all the features of your app and notifies you if something is not behaving as it should. And the best part of having Baymax in your team is that he can go through your app way faster than you or your team can. On a large project, Baymax may take a few minutes if not seconds to go through thousands of features while it will take your QA team weeks if not months to do the same.

In this session we will talk about how having Baymax could make or break your tech startup.

Dawit Abraham

Qene Technologies, Gebeya | Game Developer, Android Developer, Trainer

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia