Overview
Uptodate Developers is a YouTube channel that lets French-speaking viewers watch recordings of the developer workshops, hackathons and student meetups run by a software company in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The videos are a working record of what the company delivered rather than a polished tutorial series. Most are in French, with some in English1.
The company behind it, Uptodate Developers, shortened to UPDEV, builds software for local needs and runs training programmes, conferences and coding competitions for young developers2. Much of the channel's later material covers Cardano3. The hackathon and the two closing reports were produced as deliverables under grants from Project Catalyst, the community fund that Cardano holders vote on4. Nothing has been published to the channel since April 2025; what remains is the archive.
Key Features
- A first-hand record of a funded student hackathon. The channel carried information sessions, a working session and a closing video for the Cardano-East Africa Hackathon, which drew student teams from universities in four African countries5.
- Closing reports you can watch rather than read. Two grant-backed community projects filed closing videos here. Project Catalyst records the French-language outreach programme for Africa as complete and fully paid6; it records the student blockchain learning clubs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as unfinished, with 21,600 of 36,000 ADA distributed7.
- Smart-contract teaching in French. A 2022 run of recorded live sessions covered smart contracts, the small programs that run on a blockchain, for an audience with little French-language material to learn from8.
- Product demonstrations from the same team. The catalogue included a release video for Adaex, an application built to convert ADA into African local currencies through mobile money9.
- An ecosystem view filmed in Central Africa. Community sessions held in Goma were recorded and published by the Goma-based company that organised them2.
What to Expect
The videos are recordings of events as they happened — long-form workshop, meetup, hackathon and closing-report footage. A visitor expecting produced explainer videos will find meeting recordings instead.
Language is the main filter. Most videos are French. English runs through much of the Cardano material, with the hackathon closeout, both Catalyst closing reports and one hackathon information session all carrying English titles and descriptions. For a French speaker after Cardano material made in Africa rather than translated into it, that is the draw6.
The channel has not published since April 2025, so it reads as an archive: the value sits in what it documents, not in what comes next. Anyone following the team's ongoing work will get further at the company's own site, which carries its services, blog and developer portal2.
The channel served as somewhere to put the recordings so students, grant reviewers and the wider Cardano community could see what had happened4. That makes it more useful as a primary source on a handful of specific projects than as a general starting point. For a broad introduction, an overview of what sets Cardano apart is the better first stop.
