Five reasons why African developers should go to Twitter Flight

As you all know by now Twitter has finally launched a mobile developer conference. Think f8 for Twitter. As the platform describes it, Flight is a “gathering built by developers, for developers”.

According to Twitter, if you live, breathe and occasionally dream in Java, Objective-C or Swift then you will be right at home at Flight. The conference begins with a keynote Twitter’s head honcho, Dick Costolo, capped off with a mixer for engineers (geeks who mingle).

In honour of the upcoming conference, the social media platform has revamped its developer site, dev.twitter.com.

“We’ve reorganized all of the content so that it’s easier for you to navigate and get your questions answered. All of the old discussions have been migrated to our new discussion forum; you can reclaim your old posts by logging in with your Twitter account. We’ll be adding a lot more features to the site over the coming weeks,” said Twitter.

“This is an extraordinary time to be an app developer. Our mission is to provide you with the tools you need to build great apps — and great businesses.”

Twitter is the second most popular and is the fastest growing social site in South Africa and fast growing in other parts of the continent.

“Twitter saw the highest percentage growth among the major social networks, from 2,4-million to 5,5-million – showing 129% growth in 12 months,” WorldWideWorx.

Here some reasons we think African developers need to get themselves to San Fran come October 22.

Africa is mobile

This is a mobile developer conference! Africa eats, breathes and sleeps mobile. This is a good opportunity for African developers to see how Twitter can be integrated into products that they are building. How can Twitter help your app make money or gain traction, this is the place to learn about that and be part of that ecosystem.

Build unique products for the African market

Twitter’s potential for business and for developers is still being discovered. This could be a great opportunity to find out how you can build unique products through Twitter for the African market. It time for African developers to get into the mainstream and begin partnering with big tech companies to create unique products for the African market.

Join the Twitter expansion early

Twitter is expanding in Africa and reaching out to agencies here via their partner Ad Dynamo in South Africa and Nigeria, so they’re aware of us, they know about our growing need for products and growing market. Developers should take this opportunity understand the platform a bit better, get to know the community and best practices.

Social for developers

Twitter is not just something for the social media managers in company to understands. It is time for developers to get involved and get to know the community better and upskill themselves. This means making themselves more marketable and keep up to date with changes in the API and widgets.

Let’s just go represent

It is time for African developers to go and represent the talent on the continent. Time to make an impact and also bring some insight from the African landscape to a mainly US aimed conference, discuss challenges facing African developers, help Twitter understand how they can support/improve/adapt for Africa from an app development point of view.

Hattip: Melissa Chetty.