What building software in Ethiopia teaches you about assumptions

Every framework carries hidden assumptions.

When you install a payment library and realize it has never heard of Telebirr, you are not encountering a gap — you are encountering a decision someone made about whose context was default. The same is true of offline handling, of bandwidth assumptions, of the language models trained on data that underrepresents this continent by orders of magnitude.

Building in Addis makes you fluent in the gap between what software assumes and what people actually need. That fluency is not a disadvantage. It is leverage.

The things that break your product here — intermittent connectivity, payment fragmentation, users who switch between Amharic and English mid-sentence — are the things that will matter everywhere as software moves to places it has not been designed for.

You are not building for the edge case. You are building for the future.