Mentoring in Gaza's First Hackathon – Manish Sinha – Engineer

8/15/2019 Mentoring in Gaza's First Hackathon – Manish Sinha – Engineer

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mentoring-in-gazas-first-hackathon-manish-sinha-engineer 1/9

6/8/2016 Mentoring in Gaza' s first hackathon – Manish Sinha – Engineer

http://dopeboy.github.io/gaza/

Manish SinhaEngineer

Blog About

Mentoring in Gaza's first hackathon

Last month, I spent eight days in the Gaza strip in Palestine. There, I mentored

Gazan entrepreneurs, taught workshops, and got to judge in Gaza’s first ever

hackathon. I was invited by Gaza Sky Geeks, a startup incubator that is part of a

humanitarian organization called Mercy Corps. The trip was self-funded.

What follows is a collection of notes and observations from my trip.

Setup

I’ve always wanted to go to Gaza. Like many places in the world, I knew what it

looked like on cable television news. I wanted to see what it was like with my own

eyes. I wanted to see what the Gazan thinking, spirit, and culture was like. So when

a friend told me about an opportunity to mentor entrepreneurs in Gaza, I jumped.Not only could I go to Gaza but I could also bring along two passions of mine—

technology and education—to be part of it.

I applied and was interviewed over Skype. I was asked about general problem

solving skills and my comfort level with following ground rules (more on that later).

Once I passed the interview, I bought a plane ticket and applied to the Israeli military

for a permit to cross into Gaza via the Erez crossing.

I flew from San Francisco to Tel-Aviv. From there, I went to the southern Israeli city

of Ashkelon where I was picked up by a staff member and driven down to Erez to

make the crossing into Gaza.

Notes

1. There is a one-mile no-mans-land walkway between Israel and Gaza. This is the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erez_Crossing

http://www.mercycorps.org/

http://www.gazaskygeeks.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip


http://dopeboy.github.io/


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erez_Crossing

http://www.mercycorps.org/

http://www.gazaskygeeks.com/


http://dopeboy.github.io/about








Erez crossing. There are drivable roads but they are reserved for the UN and

Red Cross.

2. There were seven mentors in total—three from the US and four from Europe.

Some came from big companies, some worked at small startups. Some were

engineers, some were data scientists. Everyone had different motivations for

coming. Some were of Palestinian descent and wanted to see the other half of

home. Others were curious about Gaza like me.





3. There are ground rules every mentor had to agree to before going. We could not

go anywhere unaccompanied. We had to stay inside the incubator or our hotel.

On the one tour we did go on, we stayed along a UN sanctioned path. These

precautions were taken out of safety.

4. Due to geopolitical differences, shortage of funds, and lasting effects from

previous wars, there are only six hours of electricity in Gaza per day. There’s no

fixed schedule either; some days it’s available from midnight to 6 in the morning,

other days it’s available noon to 6 in the evening. Many organizations, including

Gaza Sky Geeks and the UN, have backup generators that run off petrol.

You get used to it. At the incubator, the lights would go out every so often for a

minute before the generators turned on. No one flinched; you just carry on in the

dark. For those without access to generators, UPSes and battery packs are a

must.

5. Hamas is the ruling political party in Gaza and they enforce parts of Sharia law.

One example of this came out in the hackathon. On the first day of the 48 hour

hackathon, all female participants had to leave by 6:30 PM. This is because,

under Sharia law, women cannot hang out with men they are not related or

married to late into the evening.





6. The gulf (UAE, Saudi, Qatar, etc) is the closest regional tech hub accessible to

Gaza. I met many Gazan programmers who either freelanced or worked for

companies based out of the gulf. I believe the reasons for this are three fold:

same language, lower costs, and an economic way for them to support the

Palestinian cause.

7. I’ve been asked a lot about the programming competency of Gazan developers.

I saw a lot of competency with PHP (CodeIgniter and Laravel on the framework

side), C# .NET, and certain gaming frameworks such as Unity. I did not see a lot

of expertise with some of the more “bleeding edge” technologies such as React,

Angular, Node, Go, or Rust. I do live in Silicon Valley startup land so my view

might be skewed.

As far as work ethic, I came away really impressed. I saw a lot of drive and grit. I

hosted two workshops at the incubator - an introduction to prototyping and an

introduction to python. In both cases, turnout was spectacular, questions were

well-informed and meaningful, and attendees always wanted to stay longer and

keep working. This was one of my most happiest moments from the trip.





8. I made it a point to learn some Arabic everyday. Here are my favorite words and

phrases:

maz huafa = good luck

nana = mint

ya hamkoum allah = bless you (after a sneeze)

enduk ai sou-elle = any questions?

Fun fact - there are several crossover words between Hindi and Arabic. I tried to

drop them in conversation as much as I could. Here’s a list.

9. For the longest time, I was jealous of medical students and doctors. They had a

very clear way to apply their skills, do social good, and travel abroad. Engineers

have similar outlets but they mostly revolve around civil engineering projectssuch as building wells or setting up computer labs. As a software engineer, it just

hasn’t been obvious what I could personally do to hit that triple bottom line.

I think that’s now changing for two reasons:

Software programming has become a tool for economic development. [Why

this happened just recently is something I’ll explore in a future post]. In a

http://www.ewb-usa.org/

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/

http://baheyeldin.com/linguistics/hindi-words-arabic-origin.html





place such as Gaza that is bounded by hard borders, software breaks

through. The challenge then becomes to (1) educate/train talent to become

software programmers that are aware of the latest technologies and software

development methodologies and (2) connect those programmers with

employment opportunities. Internationally trained engineers can make a

difference with (1).

Technology entrepreneurship has gone mainstream (whether this is a good

thing I’ll save for another day). There’s a common methodology everyone

has adopted or is atleast aware of: Lean. Even people outside the startup

scene know what an MVP is. The word “hackathon” has entered the lexicon.

These events create a venue for socially engaged entrepreneurial engineers

(SEEE what I did there?) to bring their experience building businesses in

their countries to places such as Gaza. Though businesses can’t be cloned

wholesale to underdeveloped markets, there is value to bringing in peoplewho might have attempted to build or have even used a developed

competitor.

10. I met a Gaza Sky Geeks staff member who told me about his story. His parents

had to flee their ancestral home from Jaffa in 1948. He lost his childhood home

in the war of 2014. He also lost friends and neighbors in the war.

Despite all of this, you would never be able to guess of any of his past after

talking to him. In fact, the only reason I knew to talk to him is because I

overhead someone else mention his past. He’s the most upbeat, jovial guy at

the space who was on his way to the U.K. in a couple days with an eye on a

seed round for a startup he’s working on. One might expect atleast some chip on

the shoulder, some bitterness, maybe even a little anger. I haven’t seen that

from him or any of other Gazans I’ve met and that—more than anything else—

has been the biggest surprise for me on this trip.

Parting thoughts

I had a wonderful time in Gaza in no small part to the hospitality Gazans gave me

when I was there. I want to give a huge shout out to the staff at Gaza Sky Geeks.

Thank you for hosting this program and inviting us from abroad. I do want to return

again some day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development





If you’re interested in participating in such a program or have questions about it,

reach out to me and I’ll pass you on to the right person.

More pictures








http://dopeboy github io/gaza/

Written on June 7, 2016

http://twitter.com/manishsinhaha

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/manish-sinha/66/5b3/967

http://github.com/dopeboy

mailto:[email protected]

Documents

Mentoring in Gaza's First Hackathon – Manish Sinha – Engineer