I’m attending Agile Africa today and tomorrow and it is such a pleasure meeting up with the awesome people from where I used to work. In addition there are so many others in the South African Agile community that I get to see only a few times a year, usually at conferences and Agile Coach retreats. I Uber’ed in so I wouldn’t have to worry about parking and it was just as well since I heard that parking got a bit tight at the hotel parkade.

As usual I engaged the drivers in conversation to learn more about the person behind the driver. This morning’s driver was 60 years old and was an HR officer at an NGO operating in Africa, doing work in the field of HIV/AIDS. The funding for this NGO came from Canada and when they decided to cut it, he was retrenched. So he turned to Uber to make ends meet. He still wants to open up his own HR consultancy but the economic conditions aren’t conducive to that at the moment.

This afternoon’s driver was much younger, in his twenties. He drove a car for someone else until he decided to operate his own vehicle. He wants to buy more cars and get other drivers to operate them. He wants to become an employer of others which is what this country needs.

Talking about the economic conditions. Have you seen the markets today? They look bleak, bleak, bleak! Gold looks ok though. I hope there are no more devaluations and normalisations from China again. Any overseas market sneezes and we in South Africa catch pneumonia!

Agile people are Twitter mad and #AgileAfrica reached number 3 in what was trending this morning in South Africa. As you can see the South African currency, the Rand, was trending at number 2. With good reason – $1 (USD) now costs R14 (ZAR).

That’s it for today. A bit random. I hope the markets start to recover tomorrow.