About Us  Nyanza Software
Home About Us Products & Services Alerts & News Support Links Guest Book  Site Credits		Who Are We ?   Here you will find more than you ever wanted to know about us, including:- our contact information; our mission; and, our history. Please scroll down to browse through the subsections, or choose one of the following links to jump directly to a specific subsection: Contact Us Our Mission Our History Our Developers
		Contact Us Nyanza Software is located, oddly enough, on Planet Earth. Currently, our physical home is in the young nation of Guyana, part of the Caribbean / South America region.  [For further information on Guyana, please explore the Links > General Resources > South America > Guyana subsection.] NOTE: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has given rise to a variety of rather interesting phenomena. One of these is the existence of "web-bots", small software critters which scour the Web -- i.e., the raw HTML code underlying Web pages -- looking for interesting information. Most web-bots are legitimately employed by search-engines to allow indexing the vast ocean of Web content. Unfortunately, there is an ever-growing menace from rogue web-bots whose sole purpose is to hunt for personal information such as e-mail addresses (the better for their masters & mistresses to flood us all with spam and other unsolicited solicitations, or worse). They're giving all web-bots a bad name. As a result, we have "mangled" the e-mail addresses shown here. However, the unmangled versions are also available in the 'Read Me' documents that are included in our various downloadable software packages. Nyanza Software c/o Paul Crawford 50 Robb & Albert Streets Bourda Georgetown Guyana South America Tel: +592 2263895 [NOTE: To "unmangle" these e-mail addresses, please remove the anti-spam portion and then apply the usual transformations.] E-mail: paulNOSPAM.crawford at nyanzasoftware dot com   E-mail: pNOSPAMcrawford at mac dot com   E-mail: pNOSPAMcrawford at newsguy dot com
		Our Mission As stated on the Home page, our mission is both simple and ambitious – viz., to cater for the needs of IT enthusiasts and the general community of Earthlings. Currently, due to the regrettable human limitations of finite time and energy, we can fulfill only a very small portion of that awesome mandate. ;-) For those of you wondering about our name, 'nyanza' is usually translated as 'lake' in Swahili. It is the name of a province in Kenya, and is also used in reference to the famous nearby Lake of which it forms part of the eastern shore. As for that Lake itself... While sometimes redundantly called Lake Nyanza, it also goes by the name of Lake Ukerewe (after one of the islands in its midst), or Lake "Victoria" (for those partial to the monarchs, explorers and "discoverers" from the bygone Euro-colonial era). It just so happens that this Lake is also widely considered to be the one of the two major headwaters (the other being Lake Tana in the highlands of Ethiopia) of that equally famous River which flows in various tributaries, sub-rivers and joined-rivers along what is commonly called the "Nile Valley Basin". As one might suspect, that River also had, and still has, many different names, depending on the culture, time and place. [For further information on the "Nile Valley" and the seminal civilisations of Qevs / Kush / Meroe / Ta-Seti ("Nubia") and K'm't / Kemet / Ta-Meri ("Ancient Egypt"), please explore my 'Nyanza' link toward the end of the Links > General Resources > Africa > Nile Valley subsection.]
		Our History We have not always been a tiny outfit. On the contrary, there was a time when we did not even exist at all! ;-) Up until late 2000, we were toiling away in the commercial IT world, specifically in the field of Software Development [or "Software Engineering", for those of you who prefer a slightly more upscale term ;-)]. The idea of forming our own stand-alone entity had been percolating since the mid 1990s, but was not possible until now. As of January 2006, we have become a formally registered proprietorship in Guyana! However, there are still some loose ends to tie up; e.g., we will hopefully be moving to a self-hosted site in the near future. On our initial return home to Guyana in August 2000, we had been in a state of flux, or entropy, or what-have-you ... Things were a little hectic, especially since we were anxiously awaiting the outcome of an opportunity to serve on the African Continent (specifically, South Africa). Well, in May 2002, we (and our two cats) did go to South Africa, where we spent the next three years or so, teaching Computer Science at Wits University in Johannesburg. It was in many ways a wonderful and eye-opening experience, and we were blessed with many vibrant and enthusiastic students. :-) As of May 2005, we are once again back in Guyana. Since this second return home, things had again been rather hectic for a while, and we are still not fully settled in yet. (Indeed, we might be relocating again soon, elsewhere in the Caribbean.) In addition, shortly after we became a formally registered firm in January 2006, an opportunity opened up for a long-term outsourced corporate contract for enterprise software development, which lasted from March 2006 through December 2011; I resigned due to increasing ethical concerns over certain corporate clients. This was followed by a period of various ventures aimed at individuals instead (self-funded by a portion of our own savings), from January 2012 through June 2016 (although work on some of them has been resumed sporadically as of June 2019), and then later by a series of part-time teaching stints from September 2017 to the present. So, teaching is once again taking up the bulk of our time and energy. As a result, many of our freelance software development services have now been curtailed. In particular, our enterprise development services are now effectively suspended. Even our own projects have largely taken a back seat. However, we still offer a few desktop utilities here on our site, and we are still open to some pro bono desktop development, time permitting.
		Our Developers Please check out the Our Developers subsection for further details on our technical staff [actually, at the moment, that "staff" consists of exactly one person ;-)]. Those details include brief biographies, along with CVs / résumés.
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