DEV Community: ADONIS SIMO

BuildLog #1 I am operating a SaaS product since 2023 on the African market and I will be sharing my experiences and learning.

ADONIS SIMO — Fri, 09 May 2025 00:04:27 +0000

Hello, this is the very first article of a (hopefully) series of logs about my journey. I am from an African country named Cameroon, but I have been working remotely for a US company for the last 5 years where I am currently a Technical Product Manager, and I have built various stuff for clients around the world and locally. My native language is french. That's it about me.

I started a product targeting students in late 2023, but mostly for the African market, even though it's usable anywhere. Why that market first, because i felt like it was the easiest to reach for me. But also there is a huge demands in various type of software / SaaS, and it comes with so many challenges, there is 54 countries on the African continent, most countries has different languages (+2000) and currencies (41), the population is mainly young and younger.

This makes it interesting because there is a lot of challenges in such market and I believe it helps creating value at a global scale if I learn the skills to build and run a tech product in that kind of market. if I take a few examples of the challenges :

Most peoples have never had a bank account or even used a credit card, so it's very hard to build subscription based tech business, unless it's VERY VERY VERY useful.
The main payment system across the continent is mobile based (they call it Mobile Money), a digital wallet attached to one person phone number and used to pay various good and services.
Most time online purchase are associated with poor quality product, customer service and scams, so a lot of people have a bad experiences and views about online purchases and that's not even about tech product or software.
Internet coverage is very low in a lot of countries, so most users are not necessarily tech savvy.
Most people prefers the human contact before purchasing something online.

Each of these points add a challenge on it's own, for example I discovered that I could increase the purchase rate by adding a simple button to join a Support group on WhatsApp (main communication app in most countries). Some one told me about the fact she thought she had been scammed after purchasing and she didn’t know how to get in touch with me (there was a bug on the app at that time)

A lot of users are not tech savvy and they don't even have a proper computer, so I had to work the mobile version of the application (responsive , light and fast) and increase the usability on mobile.

I had to really workout the landing page and the words to make sure the user understand very well what the app does and how it does it. I couldn’t charge a recurring fee, so I built a one time payment system, so the user pays per document, I know it's still possible to do subscriptions but i will share this story later (turn out a some users are willing to pay a subscription).

I operated the platform in one country for a year, received some payments, and then decided to expand internationally. This led to another round of issues and challenges, not very technical but more economics and financials. I said earlier that we have 41 currencies on the continent, and it's VERY hard to move money between countries (even neighbor countries). And stripe does not work, so i couldn’t create a stripe account and use it, PayPal works but partially (in some countries yes in some no), but it's well know. In my country for example I can use PayPal to send money but not receive.

Going international meant I should have register business in many countries to receive payments, but I did not have the time or the money, so I used a company from a friend (where I am also involved) to do so. For the moment most countries from where users are paying share the same currency as my country (only in the name lol, F CFA), but i can't even access those money now, But at least I am glad I see payments coming in regularly. Most of them are coming through Mobile Money payments, i was able to work with a friend in Canada to get a stripe account and another one in EU to get a PayPal account, and I've got payments in both of them from the very first day i did pushed them to online.

let's talk about numbers a bit.

At the moment I have:

~1130 users ,
+1500 documents created

it generated ~ $ 500 till date, I know it does not seem good and it's small, but it's a lot in my currency and considering that i did not invested a lot of time and no marketing campaign on it. For example early this year I verified the numbers and tried to count the amount of revenue it would have generated during the year 2024, it was roughly ~ $2000 ( 1 000 000 F CFA) the exact number is around 850 000 F CFA, this was HUGE for many reasons: I did not really promote it the whole year, some month I did not even talk about it online, and more importantly some user where simple not able to pay because the payment during that year where not available in their countries. I was also able to receive payments from EU clients recently.

But the platform receives more and more visitors, users and customers. I work regularly to improve the experience and to promote it on social media.

So i decided to continue and share my story. The upcoming posts will be around the technical choices I made when building this, some will be about how I am promoting it.

Cheers.

How to upload webpack bundle to S3 / Cloudfront ?

ADONIS SIMO — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 11:04:11 +0000

Hi, I am working with a team on a project using NestJS Framework to build a web application. It uses webpack to build the JS file (app.js) and we include it in the index.html file which is been served to the browser, that app.js file can go to a size of 2Mb and it's been downloaded everytime a page is been displayed.

I was wondering if there is a way to upload that file (app.js) to S3 and serve it from there instead.

Have you ever have such experience in the past ?

How to reduce DNS query response time ?

ADONIS SIMO — Tue, 04 May 2021 00:15:25 +0000

Hi, I am facing a kind of weird issue with my backend api, all the query i send to it with a tool like Insomnia REST client or raw python code using requests lib take ~77sec to reach the server and return a response, but it is fast when i do the same query from the frontend app (via API Calls).

I tried this command from a forum, it seem related to the DNS.

My API is hosted on AWS (ECS) and everything is behind an Application Load Balancer, when i check the stat (Target Response Time, etc) everything is normal, i mean response are in average 400ms, that makes me think the issue is with the DNS system.

Thanks

Is there any adult (+18) website developer here ?

ADONIS SIMO — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 19:15:43 +0000

I use to see demand of every kind of developer out there by recruiters, but never heard of someone looking for a dev for adult website dev work. But i am sure there is a demand somewhere.

I am interested in how it feel to work on that kind of projects ? Is there requirement on age ? Does that part of the industry allow freelancers or they prefer in-house developers ? Is it something you feel comfortable to talk about ? Anything else you would like to share.

I know it's a particular technical demanding field, i read somewhere a story on how a porn site dev team used Websocket and canvas to avoid Ad Blockers and show Ads.

Thanks

Is there a compatibility issue with Postgres and python UUID ?

ADONIS SIMO — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 07:48:46 +0000

Am regularly receiving a 500 error in my Django backend on AWS, and the message is "UUID is not a valid UUID", and it's raised by a Validation error.

The weird about this is, i just have to restart the server and everything continue to work without problem. But sometime it crash, and i am not able to know what cause this.

This issue is the same explained here: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/29293

Am only having this in production.

Hope someone has face and resolve the similar issue in the past.

Thanks

Building a URL shortener service series, Introduction.

ADONIS SIMO — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 11:17:23 +0000

Hi, it's been a long time i didn't post here.

Was mostly working on clients project since couples of months now, mostly as backend developer with Django framework, but in past i was writing Js code with React (before hooks comes out). One of my latest contract leads me to work with AWS and it's quite large, so i decided to train by practicing and obtain 2 certifications this year. My plan for this consist more in building various tools and host them using various AWS services.

What tool am i building now ?

My first tool is a URL shortener service like bitly. It is small enough to allow me to add new features at every working session and avoid discouragement and stop working.

Current tech stack:

Frontend: React.js (JavaScript)
Backend: Flask (Python)
Database: Redis & PostgreSQL (or another one)

What am i expecting to learn ?

React's hooks
React's new dev practice (it's been a long time i didn't touch that)
Flask, yes it feel like a shame to be a python backend dev without experience in Flask, but it's never too late to learn it.
Some basics UX design principles to build a usable UI
AWS cache service.
Small app deployment service with AWS (will need advices here)

How will i progress ?

As my plan is to work every night on one feature, i will have to made a small blog post about the feature in this series to show my progress and explain what i've learned, where i was stuck and what to do next.

What i can expect from you

Am open to new ideas about the project and even advices about everything you thing is necessary (from hosting service to project design).

Thank you, hope we will discover great things.

As a freelancer software developer, what is your working process ?

ADONIS SIMO — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 20:19:04 +0000

When you get a new contract and all the requirements from your client, how do you plan your work ? What is the first thing you do ?

How to create sub-domain automatically when users register on my SaaS application ?

ADONIS SIMO — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 22:53:33 +0000

Hi, am currently working on a SaaS product and i will need to create sub-domain on fly as users register on the app. I think this operation is related to the DNS provider or the hosting service, via an API for example. But i don't really know how it work. Looking for some help on this.

thanks

Am a Cameroonian software developer, Ask Me Anything!

ADONIS SIMO — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 09:42:52 +0000

Does a CS degree from Africa (especially Cameroon) is enough to land a tech job in any country ? Like USA, UK, or others.

ADONIS SIMO — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 11:18:37 +0000

E-commerce platforms in Django ecosystem.

ADONIS SIMO — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:16:50 +0000

Another tough subject, when it come to e-commerce people use to think WooCommerce, Prestashop, Magento etc... There is also some good solutions for that into the django ecosystem and as usual those solutions are very versatiles a give a great customizations possibilities to the developer. Let see 3 of them, those are the one i have worked with.

Shuup

Ready for use ecommerce solution, it is built to be used in a case of multi/single-vendor ecommerce platform, you can create the next amazon or the next shopify with shuup. It is open source (of course) and there is 2 main way to use it, cloud version or self-hosted version. As you guest you will pay for the cloud version and it allow you to do whatever shuup allow you to do without worrying about server uptime and others, the second version is easy to set up on you own servers like a normal django project, in this case you are responsible of keeping servers up and running with maintainance cost it include etc...

Personnally i would compare it to a platform like magento in term of what can be get done with that. (from what i have seen about the two platform)

Checklist

Project website & repo :https://shuup.com/ & https://github.com/shuup/shuup
Github stars : 890
Multi-vendor : YES
CMS : Yes
Default website HTML template : It is shipped with a modern HTML 5 template yep complete and good looking. Sufficient to demonstrate all the default features of the thing.
Customizability: It came with a documentation to allow you design and develop your ecommerce website.
Plugins: They (creators) have created a plugin system (addons) easy to use, you can define them within the django project or upload them within the admin UI
Themes : There is a way to create themes for the platform, they are created as django apps and it use Jinja templating system, which is more advance than the default django's one.
Community : N/A
Cloud version : Yes
Commercial support : Yes
API : yes
Activity reports : Yes
Payment and Shipping's solution integrations capabilities : Yes
Dashboard : Advanced

Saleor

Claimming to be "A GRAPHQL-FIRST ECOMMERCE PLATFORM FOR PERFECTIONISTS", this is a really advanced ecommerce platform in this ecosystem in terms of shipped technologies. It storefront is build as a PWA with React.js and the whole system work on GraphQL.

Checklist

Project website & repo: https://getsaleor.com & https://github.com/mirumee/saleor
Github stars : 4050
Multi-vendor : NO
CMS : Yes
Default website HTML template : The default storefront is a PWA built with react.js
Customizability: Easy to customize.
Plugins: Plugins are built following some specs well defined within the documentation
Themes : Can be easilly create following the documentation
Community : N/A
Cloud version : No
Commercial support : NO
API : yes
Activity reports : No
Payment and Shipping's solution integrations capabilities : Yes
Dashboard : Low

Oscar

A domain driven ecommerce solution. Oscar have been created to be modified as the developer want, it easily allow you to add your business logic into the ecommerce workflow. It is separated into several apps with a dashboard to handle products, reviews, inventory etc.

Checklist:

project website & repo : http://oscarcommerce.com/ & https://github.com/django-oscar/django-oscar
Github stars : 3601
Multi-vendor : NO
Default website HTML template : It come with a simple bootstrap template used to showcase default features. The most of work will be to override it (change it) a part from changing business logic of the store.
Customizability: 100 % it has been build to be customize, the code provide a lot of generic code and a lot of class designed to be inherited and overriden. AbstractProduct for example inherited by Product. It even provide a command to fork and override its apps.
Plugins: There is some plug in for different purpose availble out there, from payments gateway to REST api enabler.
Community : https://slack.oscarcommerce.com/
Cloud version : No
Commercial support : yes
API : yes
Activity reports : Yes
Payment and Shipping's solution integrations capabilities : Yes
Dashboard : Medium

Those are not the only ecommerce solutions within this ecosystem but those are the most complete ones (from what i've see) and there is still a lot of good solutions out there depending on what you are going to build or your budget, here is the django package grid for the ecommerce : https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/ecommerce/

Thanks for reading this, am a Django Developer and a writing enthusiast (starting out), if you found any error in this article or anything that deserve a review, pleas leave it in comments; Have a great times.

What does a backend developer's portfolio should look like ?

ADONIS SIMO — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 21:24:54 +0000

Designers can create visual stuff and publish them on behnace and others, same for front end dev. But when you only know how to optimize databases, SQL queries, and API what should you add into a portfolio ?