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

Hi all,

I was watching a YouTube video of a guy explaining how it was watching anime in Africa. It was a very funny and relatable story about buffering, downloading episodes overnight, and praying that the power did not go out at 95%. That video gave me the idea for this article: what it meant to be a developer in Cameroon or Africa, 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. This was where we created our first YahooMail accounts. This was where we started downloads for software and games that never finished because someone else needed the computer.

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 main access to coding resources were PDF books. Thank God that 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 5 KB per second on a good day.

We struggled at every step. No computers. Even when we had them, they were slow as hell. Almost no electricity. 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, 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.

The USB Modem Revolution

Then USB modem dongles became a thing. Suddenly, we could have internet access at home on GSM — 2G speeds. We launched downloads every midnight for books, for Sublime Text, for 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.

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 for their time: over 100 MB. That was a multi-day download.

Then came Java. Not JavaScript — the confusion was wild back then. 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.

This was also the glorious period of mobile websites: WapDam, WapTrick, and others. 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.

And jQuery was the standard for manipulating the DOM, because JavaScript was considered trash. Try explaining var and IIFE to someone from that era.

We could not have known about Bitcoin. Even if we did, who had the money to put into it? And even those who had money, who would have believed in a digital currency? Back then, 1 BTC was about $1.

I will spare you the fights with mobile operators about bundle prices, expiration times, and usage tracking. We all have scars.

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.

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, 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. Bundlers were not very popular yet. We wrote script tags in HTML and we liked it.

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 terabytes of video courses, and we were stingy about it — “I will give you the React course if you give me the Node.js one.” We collected hundreds of hours of videos that we never watched. Copy-pasting from PDFs was gone. Now we typed-pasted from videos. It was the age of two monitors — one for the tutorial, one for your code.

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.

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

• Yes, we still have connectivity issues.
• Yes, we still have electricity problems.
• Yes, our purchasing power is still too weak to buy the best equipment.

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 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.

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.

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. The smell of a cybercafé at 10 PM. The sound of a dial-up connection that meant someone was actually using the phone.

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.

What is your most ridiculous developer memory from the early days? I would love to hear it.

Note: Bitcoin price as of May 2026. Developer salaries and equipment specs are based on collective memory and some exaggeration for comedic effect. You know who you are.