From CyberCafes to Starlink — What It Meant to Be a Developer in Cameroon

Hi all,

I was watching a YouTube video of a guy explaining what it was like watching anime in Africa. The buffering. The overnight downloads. The prayer that the power would not go out at 95%. It was painfully funny because it was true.

That video gave me the idea for this article: what did it mean to be a developer in Cameroon back then? And what has actually changed?

So let me take you on a journey. A journey of slow internet, weaker computers, and the glorious pain of building software when everything was fighting against you.

The CyberCafé Era

Home internet was not a thing. The golden age was the CyberCafé — and specifically the “Pro” management software that counted every second of your browsing time like a taxi meter. You walked in, paid for 30 minutes, and watched the clock.

This was where we created our first Yahoomail accounts. The ones with names like “king_of_software2006” and “princesse_coder”. This was where we started downloads for software and games that never finished — because someone else needed the computer, or the manager restarted the system, or your time ran out.

There was no real social media yet. Facebook was still a dorm room project. We had forums, chat rooms, and maybe MSN Messenger if you were fancy.

It was also the time when some of us discovered Process Explorer. I have nothing more to say here. The less said, the better.

The main access to coding resources were PDF books. Thank God back then files were not as heavy as they are today. A 5 MB PDF felt huge, but it was manageable over a connection that gave you 10-15 KB per second on a good day. You started the download, went to eat, came back, and prayed it did not fail.

We struggled at every step. No computers at home. Even when we had them, they were slow as hell. Almost no electricity — “Délestage” was a word we learned before “variable”. No internet at home. No books in libraries. No video tutorials. No podcasts. You had whatever you could download between 6 PM and 6 AM when the cybercafé had “night browsing” at half price.

The best among us had a Pentium 3 or 4, with 1 GB of RAM — if you were lucky — running at maybe 1,000 MHz, not 10,000. (I see you, my friend who wrote “10000 MHz” and made every hardware engineer cry.)

With no internet at home, we used Notepad or Notepad++ to write the C code we read from our downloaded PDFs. No Bluetooth, no QuickShare. We exchanged files — and mostly viruses — through our USB flash drives of 256 MB. If you had 512 MB, you were the king.

And let me tell you about FileCut. That software was our best friend. We split setups into 4 or 5 pieces to transfer them from one computer to another because the flash drive was too small. Then we reassembled them praying the CRC did not fail. Sometimes it did. Then you started over.

The Golden Age of CDs and DVDs

But flash drives came later. Before that, we had CDs and DVDs. Scratched CDs and DVDs.

You would borrow a Windows XP installation CD from a friend. The CD had more scratches than a vinyl record from the 80s. You put it in the drive, closed the tray, and held your breath. If the drive made a grinding noise, you knew you were in trouble.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it did not. And when it did not, you had tricks. You cleaned the CD with toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste. You rubbed it gently, rinsed it, dried it, and tried again. If that failed, you tried saliva. Do not judge. We were desperate.

And if you had a DVD burner? You were a hero. You were the person everyone wanted to be friends with. You could copy software, movies, music, games. You could take a scratched CD from someone, read it slowly, and burn a fresh copy that worked.

We used Nero Burning ROM. The icon was a flaming colosseum. That software was sacred. We knew how to burn a CD, how to finalize it, how to make a bootable disc. We knew the difference between CD-R and CD-RW. We knew that burning at 4x was safer than 52x because it reduced errors.

And Alcohol 120%? That was for the pros. Mounting ISO files? Writing raw images? That was wizard-level stuff. You would see someone using Alcohol and you knew they were serious about their data.

We also knew Windows XP product keys by heart. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. That was the famous one. The one that came from the CD that was passed around the entire neighborhood. You could recite it in your sleep. And Windows XP setup? The blue screen. The “Press F6 to install SCSI drivers” that nobody ever pressed. And the estimate: “39 minutes remaining.” It never took 39 minutes. It took anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours. But that number was burned into our brains.

Installing Windows took the whole afternoon. You started at 2 PM, and by 6 PM, you were installing drivers. Then you realized you forgot the network driver. Then you had to find another computer to download it. Then you put it on a USB drive. Then the USB drive had a virus. Good times.

The USB Modem Revolution

Then USB modem dongles became a thing. Suddenly, we could have internet access at home on GSM — 2G speeds. You bought a credit of 500 FCFA for 10 MB. Yes, 10 MB. You turned off images in your browser. You disabled CSS. You browsed the mobile version of everything.

We launched downloads every midnight. Why midnight? Because some operators had “night plans” — unlimited from 12 AM to 6 AM. Unlimited meant 2 GB, but we did not know that yet. We downloaded books, Sublime Text, anything we could find.

Sublime Text was a revolution. Its dark Monokai theme was so different from the white background of Notepad++ that every editor that came after just copied it. We felt like hackers writing code in the dark. We changed our desktop themes to dark. We felt powerful.

PHP was the entry language for most of us. Why? Because it dominated the web at that time, and it was very simple to run. Just install Linux — mainly Ubuntu, which came on a CD from a friend — or download WAMP or XAMPP. Those installers were already huge: over 100 MB. That was a multi-day download. You started it on Monday, and by Wednesday, you had XAMPP. Then you realized you needed to download something else.

Then came Java. Not JavaScript — the confusion was wild back then. Someone would say “I know Java” and you thought they could build web apps. No, they could print “Hello World” in the terminal. Java was mostly taught in universities. Object-oriented programming was something else! Most of us still remember public static void main(String[] args) and the javac command that never worked on the first try because the classpath was wrong.

This was also the glorious period of mobile websites: WapDam, WapTrick, and others. You could download games, ringtones, and themes for your phone. Multimedia became a thing. Downloading MP3 and MP4 files of less than 1 MB was a luxury. This was the golden age of Sony Ericsson, Motorola V6, Nokia N series, and Samsung slide phones.

Opening Yahoo still took forever. Many websites did not even consider that someone in Africa might visit them. We were invisible. You would see “This content is not available in your region” and just accept it.

And jQuery was the standard for manipulating the DOM, because JavaScript was considered trash. Try explaining var, prototypes, and IIFEs to someone from that era. “What do you mean functions are objects? Just give me my DOM element.”

FileZilla was our git push, our CI/CD, our GitHub Actions all at the same time. You edited a file locally, uploaded it via FTP, and refreshed the page. No version control. No branches. Just index_final_final_v3.php.

We could not have known about Bitcoin. Even if we did, who had the money to put into it? 500 FCFA was a week of internet. And even those who had money, who would have believed in a digital currency? Back then, 1 BTC was about $1. A pizza cost 10,000 BTC. Today, that pizza would buy a house.

I will spare you the fights with mobile operators about bundle prices, expiration times, and usage tracking. We all have scars. The “valid for 7 days” that meant 5 days. The “unlimited” that meant 1 GB. The “bonus” that never came.

The 3G Arrival

Then came 3G — with Nexttel leading the way. Our USB modems, which were forever green on 2G, started showing cyan and blue. Sites started loading faster. We could explore more, try new things.

We discovered plugins for Sublime, packages for Laravel and Node.js. Internet was faster but still expensive. We copied node_modules, vendor, and extensions folders to share with friends — because downloading them again was not an option. “Here, take my node_modules folder. It’s 200 MB. Copy it to your project.”

W3Schools became home. Also SiteDuZéro (now OpenClassrooms), Codecademy. I discovered Git and GitHub. Gmail started becoming something more than an invite-only curiosity.

We had access to heavier tools: NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA — all of which took forever to launch on our machines. You clicked the icon, went to make tea, came back, and it was still loading. But we felt like professionals.

And then JavaScript took off. It was running everywhere, not just in the browser. The first JS frameworks started landing: Underscore + Backbone was the killing combo, then came Angular 1.x, then others. Bundlers were not very popular yet. We wrote script tags in HTML and we liked it. “Just add jQuery and Bootstrap. Done.”

I think at this point we almost caught up with Western countries. Being on Reddit, GitHub, and Facebook kept us generally up to date. We could not try everything, but we knew it existed and was possible.

This was the boom of video courses: Pluralsight, Coursera, Frontend Masters, and others. Storage devices became cheap. Piracy was at its peak. We exchanged gigabytes of video courses, and we were stingy about it — “I will give you the React course if you give me the Node.js one. And the Angular one. And the Docker one.”

We collected hundreds of hours of videos that we never watched. The folder was called “Learn” and it was 500 GB. We watched the first 20 minutes of each course. Copy-pasting from PDFs was gone. Now we typed-pasted from videos. Pause, type, play, pause, type. It was the age of two monitors — one for the tutorial, one for your code. If you had only one monitor, you were not serious.

Today: Different Challenges, Same Spirit

Today, things have changed. 1 Bitcoin is worth about $77,000. I would not be here writing this if I had that amount of money living in Cameroon. But here I am. No regrets. (Okay, maybe a few.)

The digital barrier is getting thinner. Our challenges are different:

• Yes, we still have connectivity issues.
• Yes, we still have electricity problems. ENEO still gives us the “délestage surprise” at 2 PM.
• Yes, our purchasing power is still too weak to buy the best equipment. A MacBook Pro costs six months of salary.

But at least we are starting to have alternatives. Starlink for those who can afford it. Solar energy and power banks for others. Remote opportunities or better pay slips for more of us.

The challenges we face are not generally at the scale of many companies in the West. We have interesting problems here too, but they are different. Optimisation issues that Silicon Valley startups face — we will likely never see them. Software architecture that requires thousands of servers? Not yet. We struggle to get 1000 users, not 1 million.

We do not have enough users for most of our problems. We do not have enough solutions yet. Most basic stacks, monolithic apps, are perfectly fine for what we need.

Discussions like “PostgreSQL vs MySQL”, “NoSQL vs SQL”, “tabs vs spaces” are not part of the equation — at least not yet. We read about them, we experiment, we play. But at the end of the day, a simple LAMP or MERN stack with good old SELECT * FROM users is enough.

And that is okay. We do not need to be Google to build something useful. We need to build something that works for Cameroon.

The Humor in Our Pain

Let me be honest: watching that YouTube video about anime in Africa made me laugh because it was true. The buffering wheel of death. The neighbor’s generator starting right when you reached 99% download. The mobile operator’s “unlimited” plan that throttled you after 2 GB and then sent you back to 2G speeds.

Remember the “Download with IDM” popup? Internet Download Manager was our hero. It could resume broken downloads. It could split files into parts. It felt like magic. You would see “Downloading at 15 KB/s” and you were happy.

Remember the joy of finding a cracked version of something? The “keygen.exe” that was probably a virus but you ran it anyway because you needed that license. Remember the “readme.txt” that said “Copy crack to installation folder” and you felt like a hacker.

We have all been there. And somehow, we still became developers. We still built things. We still learned.

We learned to debug without Stack Overflow because the page would not load. We learned to optimize code because our computers had no RAM. We learned to share because none of us had everything.

That experience made us resourceful. It made us resilient. And it made us appreciate every megabyte, every stable connection, every hour of electricity.

Final Thought

From cybercafés with Pro management software to Starlink satellites beaming internet from space — we have come a long way. The journey has been hard, often ridiculous, but never boring.

Today, a young developer in Douala or Yaoundé can access the same tools as someone in San Francisco. They can contribute to open source, take online courses, and land remote jobs. The barriers are not gone, but they are lower.

And yet, I miss some things about the old days. The thrill of finally downloading a 500 MB Visual Studio ISO after three nights of retries. The smell of a cybercafé at 10 PM — sweat, old computers, and hope. The sound of a dial-up connection that meant someone was actually using the phone line.

We complained then. We still complain now. But I would not trade the experience for anything.

If you lived through this journey, you know exactly what I mean. If you did not, trust me — you missed something special. You missed the era when being a developer meant being a warrior.

What is your most ridiculous developer memory from the early days? The time you lost code because the power went out? The time you downloaded something for a week and it was corrupted? The time you spent hours trying to read a scratched CD with toothpaste? I would love to hear it.

Note: Bitcoin price as of May 2026. All specs and memories are real but exaggerated for comedic effect. You know who you are. Shout out to everyone who survived the CyberCafé era and knows the Windows XP product key by heart.