Case Study: A Catalog of Schools
A platform that enables aspiring software engineers, and entrepreneurs find and discover tech hubs where they can be supported to learn, and build web products and services.
Africa Tech Schools
Project Requirements
- Allow users to explore tech Hubs, incubators, coding bootcamps, in the cuntry and city where they live.
- Search and rank top tech countries and cities in Africa.
- Provide users direct access to learn more about their favorite tech hub, coding school or coworking space.
- Provide custom analytics of Africa's tech ecosystem, to users, for a fee.
Project Overview
Africa < Tech /> Schools (ATS) is a catalog of technology colleges and universities, incubators, accelerators, innovation hubs, coding bootcamps, and coworking spaces in Africa. Users can discover and learn about formal and informal technology spaces in the continent. They can search and view analytics and metrics to understand tech trends, and perform comparative analysis of the tech ecosystem.
The Challenge
Create over 1,000 entries in a total of coding boot camps, tech universities/colleges, incubators, accelerators, tech hubs, and coworking spaces in Africa. The website should be visited by 5,000+ users around the globe per month.
The Approach & Solution
After comparing different tech web frameworks like Laravel, .NET Core, Flask, and Ruby on Rails, we settled on the Django framework to power the web application. One of the advantages is that Django uses Python which is a popular and versatile programming language. Several web engineers are familiar with the language, which helps us hire from the pool of talent, to extend and improve the web application. We hosted the application in Amazon AWS and used services like Amazon RDS to store some of our data. We then built our proprietary tool using a combination of Python, XML::Comma and Mason to aggregrate and generate content for the web application.
