Times have changed for developers. Reading docs used to be the source of truth, but now we're the teachers and the tools are the LLM. I tried claude, it's amazing, but working with it has always made me feel like the IDEs have the advantage over browsers, but why is that...


Recognizing that humans have biases when making decisions and judgments is important. However, there are several biases that can actually help guide you in making better judgments, arguments, or decisions, where everything isn't taken at face value.

Confirmation Bias: This occurs when individuals seek or interpret information in a way that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses while disregarding contradictory evidence.

Availability Heuristic: This bias involves giving more weight to readily available information or easily recalled from memory, rather than considering all relevant information.

Anchoring Bias: People rely heavily on the first piece of information encountered (the "anchor") when making decisions, even if it's irrelevant to the decision at hand.

Overconfidence Bias: This bias leads individuals to overestimate their own abilities, knowledge, or the accuracy of their judgments.

Loss Aversion: People tend to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains, often leading to risk aversion and potentially missing out on beneficial opportunities.

Sunk Cost Fallacy: This occurs when individuals continue a course of action because of previously invested resources (time, money, effort) despite the lack of prospects for success.

Hindsight Bias: After an event occurs, individuals tend to believe that the outcome was more predictable than it actually was, leading them to perceive events as having been more predictable than they were at the time.

Recency Bias: This bias involves giving more weight to the most recent information or experiences when making decisions, often overlooking more distant or less recent data.

Groupthink: Individuals within a group tend to conform to prevailing attitudes or decisions, sometimes suppressing dissenting viewpoints or critical thinking.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: This refers to the cognitive bias wherein individuals with low ability in a particular domain tend to overestimate their ability, while those with higher competence may underestimate their skill relative to others.

Three cognitive biases that you are likely to encounter are the Dunning-Kruger effect, confirmation bias,  groupthink and anchoring bias.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/__wchr/niXAJF7

Biases: The Good and the Bad

MSM will exploit one's fear. Why report before facts?

I couldn't agree more that your friends are your net worth;

https://twitter.com/builderio/status/1516553394231644166?s=20&t=xBBjaW0_RSIumyBsNGI29g

The whole food delivery thing is a race to the bottom;
Recently I order from  Jumia Foods,  two 3 piecers which cost currently KES.570(~$4);
There was an existing promo that made each cost around KES.399(~$3). I am a Jumia Prime member so my delivery is free ... 

Normally the delivery costs around KES.129 (~$1), mind you the prime membership was worth KES.500(~$4.50) for 3 months so my delivery is free and for the amount of time I have ordered from Jumia, they are basically paying for it. Anyway, there was a promo from Jumia discounting..

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/__wchr/rTXEn0y

Delivery apps race to the bottom.

From this tweet I posted 10 months ago;
https://twitter.com/__wchr/status/1387037322990944259
Safaricom was able to solve a couple of things but they haven't addressed the issues yet. 

So what did they address; 🧵

You no longer need Internet Explorer to access the G2 portal (btw should not even exist, everything should exist in the Daraja portal or do an overhaul. That was it, they made some UI changes to the dashboard, I like the TRY API functionality that works with STK push alone 😆.

They didn't address Basic Auth just yet, just copying the key and decoding with btoa will expose your consumer credentials. I understand they are using some Oracle and it's out of their control but they can invest in building their own, $193,236,714 was transacted in the last yr.

We still need different accounts in the G2 portal to manage different products, which basically means if you need to initialize mobile payments by STK that a different login from the B2C money disbursement product.

Poor developer experience when trying to go live, after you have gone through the process of going live you need to shout an email to them for them to share credentials through Email, I don't have to a security expert to notice that's kind of a security issue.

The credentials they send are enough to withdraw cash from your business wallet.

There are lots of problems and things stated in the previous tweet. Come on Safaricom, you can do better you already have a monopoly, you non-dev platforms are great 💯 what's stopping you from building a great experience on the Developer Experience front.

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/__wchr/1cEh0jQ

Mpesa API problem 2

I would like to apologize on behalf of all developers to the user who owns test@gmail.com account.

At this point, I think Slack should have its own version of Google drive.

I have interacted with the @SafaricomPLC Mpesa API for a while now, built products on top of it, it's a great product can't lie. It offers lower transaction fees and fast transactions but it has its hurdles, before and after going live and some things don't make sense.
Thread/

1/ Going live is a pain
Going live is a whole process on its own, you need certain documents to verify if one is a sole proprietor or a company, that makes sense but don't make me do that for each product

2/ Internet Explorer
What's the deal with you guys forcing devs to use IE, a dead product by Microsoft to enable API users, move money, and other tasks that can be done on the Daraja portal as you did for Mpesa for business portal
https://m-pesaforbusiness.co.ke/LNM
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21372487/microsoft-internet-explorer-11-support-end-365-legacy-edge

3/ Basic Authentication
They need to update the way they handle Oauth token generation or just change it to use API Keys which can be assigned different permissions because the basic auth is flawed in so many ways.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/http-the-definitive/1565925092/ch12s03.html

4/ Support
All contact links and forms on Daraja are dead and don't try social media they can't help, all comms are through email, most of the time they aren't timely either.

5/ Uptime Status Page
The lack of a status page where developers can subscribe to alerts or RSS feed makes it quite a task to update your user when some vital Mpesa features are down.

6/ App Transfers
A lot of Kenyan companies contract payment integration features to outsource developers who might register the products with their own emails, when it comes a time to transfer the tills/apps to the company it's a hustle that takes quite a while to finalize.

7/ Documentation
Daraja's documentation is not updated that often so when you happen to get an error response that you don't recognize, you either contact someone who has worked with the API before or through the PaymentsOverflow - KE by @ProxyAPI_KE creator, Peter.

The solutions are quite simple:
1. A single dashboard to manage all your products, also make the application process easier
2. Discontinue the IE portal
3. The use of API Keys to limit API calls and access or a better way to generate oAuth Tokens.

4. A status page where developers can easily check for uptimes, can be achieved with the help of a third-party service like Hyperping or internal tools.
5. Make the app transfer process faster and easy.
6. Dedicated developer support team on social media platforms

7. An active forum to help new developers who may have questions while using the API.