The Downtempo Blog

At the start of this year, I made a trip out to South Africa to meet up with my friend and former Yahoo! colleague (and fellow world traveler), Mike Manning. Since I’m working on finding ways to fuse my love of travel together with the work I’m doing at Downtempo, I decided to spend some time looking for designers and software developers in Cape Town that I could collaborate with on future projects. After going through my online research looking for likely collaborators, I sent some emails, packed some clothes and and my trusty MacBook Air, and headed out for Africa!

First off, Cape Town is a fantastic city. Gorgeous. Amazing. At least in the United States, it seems to be the best-kept secret in international travel. Yes, there are crime risks, but I used common sense, didn’t keep more on me that I could afford to have stolen, and have made it now through two trips and around 2-3 weeks combined in Cape Town without having any incidents. And I’ll definitely be back again soon.

My first stop was to meet with Arnold and Tracy from FUR design, and learned more about their design practice. I liked their design methodology and personal style, and agreed to keep them in mind for future projects that looked like a fit. We ended up pulling them in just a few months later for a San Francisco startup client, and they were a great team to work with, and took the team’s visual design direction to the next level.

Next, I headed out to present to the Cape Town Ruby Brigade, a wonderful bunch of Ruby on Rails developers who span across a range of backgrounds and styles. After arranging the details with the Ruby Brigade (thanks to Farrel Lifson for setting up the conference room at the Bandwidth Barn), I headed across the City Bowl with some large bags of Nando’s for our presentation lunch. I walked the group through a demo of our recently launched travel advisory aggregator, Is It Safe to Visit?, and walked through what we’d used in developing the project, and where we saw it headed.

I really enjoyed the quality of the audience discussion — there were some insightful questions about not just the implementation, but the broader concepts at work behind the project, and even the very nature of what “safety” means. This is exactly the kind of discussion we were looking to provoke as we built the project, and it was heartening to hear people dig into the issues we were looking raise. In addition, we made a number of excellent new contacts with the ever-growing Cape Town Ruby community.

Since leaving, I’ve stayed on the list with my favorite group of Cape Town Ruby developers, and hope to be back out there soon to walk through our latest travel collaboration, Nice Tips, and hear their thoughts.

In the meantime, if you’re another developer and visiting South Africa, definitely consider meeting with some of the excellent designers and developers in Cape Town. I was really impressed by the caliber of the people out there, and while it’s a long flight from San Francisco, it’s definitely worth the journey.