Herman Maritz on building EskomsePush - and what comes next

Loading player...
EskomsePush is by far South Africa's most popular smartphone application for checking load shedding schedules. Herman Maritz, co-creator of the app with Dan Wells, joins the TechCentral podcast to chat about what's next.
In the podcast, Maritz explains how the idea for the app came about - including its name - and some of the challenges he and Wells faced in developing it on a shoe-string budget.
He talks about the usage patterns on the app, including how it spikes massively when Eskom announces load shedding and the challenges involved in the backend in ensuring it stays up when this happens (hint: hyperscale cloud services have helped enormously).
The conversation covers why Google took the app out of the Play store (on a Sunday!), why ensuring the right schedules are loaded in the app is a time-consuming and extremely complex process (even with automation), and what's next for the app.
Don't miss this conversation with the co-developer of one of South Africa's most-used apps.
16 Apr 2021 English South Africa Technology · Business

Other recent episodes

Meet the CIO | Chris Shortt on what a supermarket becomes

Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to…
9 Sep 43 min

Watts & Wheels | Why electric trucks are beating electric cars to South Africa

South Africa has still not crossed 1% of new vehicle sales going to electric vehicles, well short of the 5% mark at which adoption typically accelerates, The Electric Mission executive director Hiten Parmar told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels with Wills. Parmar, who heads the non-profit advocacy body and co-founded the…
3 Sep 31 min

Winstone Jordaan on building a national EV charging network

Winstone Jordaan was building charging infrastructure before South Africa had electric cars to plug into it. GridCars began developing its backend platform in 2010. The first EVs arrived in 2013. In this episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the GridCars founder tells William Kelly why the hardware was never…
2 Sep 22 min

Watts & Wheels S1E8: ‘Tesla lands in Africa, just not here’

Episode 8 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – opens with William Kelly on his soapbox, clipboard in hand, and a simple demand: keep left, pass right. Too many South African drivers, he argues, treat the left indicator as an invitation to be overtaken rather than a…
24 Aug 1 hr 11 min