News
No Role Is Off Limits
Introduction
Every career in technology begins with a moment of permission the quiet realisation that a door you had assumed was closed has, in fact, been open all along.
On Friday, 7 August 2026, a group of female interns from the DUT App Factory walked into the DUT Innovation Lab on Ritson Campus for a workshop hosted by Chillisoft Solution Services (Pty) Ltd. The event was titled Women in Software Development: No Role Is Off Limits, and over the course of ninety minutes it did exactly what its name promised. One assumption at a time, it dismantled the idea that certain roles in software development belong to certain kinds of people.
What follows is our account of that morning what was said, what was shown, and what we carried back to our desks.
A Morning at the DUT Innovation Lab
The venue set the tone before a single slide appeared. The DUT Innovation Lab the university’s immersive digital workshop space on the first floor of Block B is built for collaboration rather than lecturing. There were no rows of desks facing a podium, and no sense of an audience being spoken at. Instead there were open tables, bright colour, and a room arranged so that everyone could see everyone else.
That mattered more than it might sound. A conversation about who belongs in software development lands differently in a room designed for conversation. By the time the session began, the interns were not sitting as spectators; they were sitting as participants.
The Chillisoft and DevFluence banners framed the front of the room, and the atmosphere was relaxed and welcoming a professional event that still felt like a group of developers talking honestly to one another.
Meet the Hosts: Chillisoft and DevFluence
Chillisoft Solution Services (Pty) Ltd is an independent South African software
development house founded in 2005 and head quartered in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal. In 2025 the company marked twenty years in business, having grown from a four-person operation serving KwaZulu-Natal into a team of more than 130 full-time employees serving over 120 customers around the world.
Its track record is substantial: custom software development, digital transformation and fintech work across a wide range of business domains, as well as the open-source Habanero framework, which has been downloaded in more than 160 countries. The company is a B-BBEE Level 2 contributor and is black female owned, with 65% shareholding a detail that gave real weight to the subject of the day.
Chillisoft was founded by Anujah Bosman, an engineer who led the business as CEO for two decades before handing operational leadership to Managing Director Peter Wiles. The fact that a woman built this company from the ground up was not presented as a headline on the day. It simply sat in the background of everything that was said, quietly making the point.
Alongside Chillisoft stood DevFluence, the company’s division dedicated to developing people rather than products. Branded the School of Professional Software Development and proudly South African, DevFluence exists to make software professionalism a reality in the world of work teaching not only how to write code, but how to think, collaborate and carry oneself as a professional developer.
Exploring Every Career Path in Software Development
The central session of the morning was built around a simple, disarming question: when you picture a career in software development, what exactly do you picture?
For most students, the honest answer is narrow. You picture a developer writing code. And because that single image is all you have, every decision you make about your future gets measured against it am I good enough at coding to belong here, or should I be looking somewhere else?
The presentation opened that picture up. Software is built by teams, and those teams are made up of a wide range of specialisations, each one a legitimate and rewarding career in its own right:
Software developers and engineers, across front-end, back-end and full-stack work
Business analysts, who translate real business problems into something a team can build
Quality assurance and test engineers, who protect users from the bugs nobody else caught
UX and UI designers, who decide how the software feels in someone’s hands
DevOps and cloud engineers, who build the pipelines and platforms everything else runs on
Data engineers, database specialists and data analysts
Solution and software architects, who design systems meant to last
Scrum masters, delivery leads and project managers, who keep teams moving together
Product owners, technical writers, support engineers and security specialists
Seeing that list laid out changed the shape of the room. Several of us recognised work we already enjoy and had never once thought of as a career.
Choosing a Role for the Right Reasons
If the first half of the workshop widened the map, the second half asked a harder question: how do women actually choose where they land on it?
The point made was an uncomfortable one, and it was made gently. Women entering technology are rarely told outright that a role is closed to them. What happens is subtler. Certain roles come to feel safer. Certain roles feel quieter, less combative, less likely to invite a fight for credibility. Over time, a young woman can drift towards those roles without ever consciously deciding to and end up building a career shaped by what felt acceptable rather than by what she actually loved.
The workshop named that drift out loud, which is the only way to interrupt it. The invitation was not to avoid the so-called comfortable roles. Business analysis, quality assurance and design are demanding, technical, high-value careers, and choosing one of them because you love it is an excellent decision. The invitation was to be honest about the reason behind the choice.
“Choose your role because you love it not because you think it’s safer, quieter, or more acceptable. No role is off limits.”
It is a line that sounds like encouragement and functions like a challenge. Taken seriously, it asks you to audit your own ambitions and check which of them are genuinely yours.
Not Just Getting In Staying In
One of the most valuable parts of the morning was the part that looked past graduation.
Much of the public conversation about women in technology stops at recruitment: how do we get more women into the industry? Chillisoft’s position, set out clearly on the day, is that recruitment is the easy half. The real measure of an inclusive workplace is retention whether women stay, progress and eventually lead.
That matters because the years in which a developer builds a career are the same years in which life tends to happen. Further study, marriage, children, caring for family, relocation. An industry that treats those seasons as interruptions will keep losing capable women, no matter how many it hires
The company described a deliberate response to this: hiring on capability, attitude and technical competence rather than assumptions about someone’s personal circumstances; genuine flexibility in how work gets done, without lowering the standard of what gets delivered; and a Progression Framework that measures people against defined competencies rather than against each other — so that advancement is a matter of clarity, not politics. The result is a company with women who have been with the business for close to two decades.
For a room full of interns about to enter the job market, this reframed what to look for in a first employer. Not just an offer an environment.
The School of Professional Software Development
DevFluence’s presence gave the day its practical edge. Chillisoft founded the school in response to a recurring request from business: not simply more coders, but skilled developers who understand the business they are building for and are equipped to solve complex problems.
The distinction DevFluence draws between a coder and a software professional resonated strongly with us. A coder makes something work. A professional writes code that others can read, tests it, takes responsibility for it in production, communicates clearly about it, and keeps learning long after the certificate is framed. The programmes cover coding principles, technical agility, working with existing code, and the overall mindset of professionalism in software development.
For DUT App Factory interns, this is familiar ground. Much of our own work involves maintaining and extending real systems that other developers built before us. Hearing a professional school name that skill explicitly — and treat it as a discipline worth teaching rather than a chore to endure was quietly validating.
Networking: The Conversations After the Slides
The formal programme closed, and the most useful part of the morning began.
Networking at a student event can be an awkward, transactional affair. This was not that. Chillisoft management, staff and interns stayed in the room and talked with us not at us about how they had got into the industry, what their first year had actually felt like, which roles they had tried and abandoned, and what they wished someone had told them at our stage.
There is a particular value in hearing this from women who are only a few years ahead of you. Advice from someone two decades into a career is wisdom; advice from someone two years in is a map. We got both.
Contacts were exchanged, questions were asked that would never have been asked with a microphone in the room, and several of us left with a clearer sense of which direction to walk in next.
What We Took Back to the App Factory
A good event leaves you inspired. A useful one leaves you with something to do differently on Monday. This one managed both. The takeaways we brought back with us were these:
The job title “software developer” is a doorway, not a destination explore the whole building before deciding where to settle.
Interrogate your reasons. If a role appeals because it feels safe rather than because it excites you, that is worth examining honestly.
Choose an employer for its culture, its progression framework and its track record of keeping women, not only for the offer on the table.
Professionalism is a skill set in its own right communication, code quality, ownership and the discipline of working well with existing code.
Representation is practical, not decorative. Seeing women doing the work makes the work imaginable.
A Word to the Next Generation
To the young women still choosing subjects, still deciding whether a technical career is for them, still quietly assuming that the interesting roles belong to someone else: this workshop was assembled for you.
Software development is not one job. It is an entire industry of them, and there is no corner of it that is closed to you. Your task is not to find the role you are allowed to have. It is to find the one you genuinely want, and then to become good enough at it that the question of permission never comes up again.
Curiosity, persistence and a willingness to ask questions will carry you further than any assumption about where you are supposed to fit.
Conclusion
The Women in Software Development: No Role Is Off Limits workshop was ninety minutes long. Its effect has lasted considerably longer.
By opening up the full range of careers in software development, by naming honestly the quiet pressures that shape women’s choices, and by showing what a workplace built for retention rather than recruitment actually looks like, Chillisoft and DevFluence gave the DUT App Factory’s female interns something more durable than motivation. They gave us information, and with it, permission.
We are grateful to Chillisoft Solution Services (Pty) Ltd for hosting the event, to DevFluence for the work it does in raising the standard of our profession, and to the Durban University of Technology for making the Innovation Lab available for a morning that several of us will still be thinking about years from now.
No role is off limits. We intend to prove it.