my first program was written in a notebook. i had just finished reading a thick-ass textbook on qbasic and had an idea for a game. when i was “done”, the code spanned multiple pages. i did not have a computer at home but thankfully, we had a computer lab in school. i went to the computer teacher’s office to request access to the lab to run the code. he took one look at what i had written and shook his head, saying it will not run - he gave me access anyway. needless to say, after painstakingly typing everything out, it was errors galore.

the teacher admired the interest though, and ultimately setup recurring classes for me and about 5 other students. he had noticed our participation in class and took it on himself to set us up for success. he was proficient in c/c++ so once he was done taking us through the basics, we started learning c. our classes were between 7am and 8am (just before...

zuck did what?

the growing trend of reduced moderation on mainstream social media services will end up being a net negative to society. “free speech” advocates were never silenced in the literal sense. they had their “safe spaces” and weird subreddits to themselves.

today, impressionable young people are getting exposed to fringe and dumb content by default, and education is still underfunded for a significant portion of the world’s population.

we have already seen where this leads.

we are not going to forget myanmar so soon, are we?

what i’m about to write reminds me of this piece i wrote in 2016.

it’s year end, and amidst the flurry of activities and moments of reflection, some bibliophiles took to their socials to share how much they’ve read over the course of the year. unsurprisingly, the non-readers jumped in to dispute certain claims without basis while high-fiving themselves with uninformed takes on reading.

i condensed my read of what was going on into this tweet. it was an observation about how unprovoked reactions often reveal insecurities. if anything, a more accurate articulation of it could have said, “your real problem might be with yourself…”. i followed it up by acknowledging my own limitations.

someone replied. their argument is a time management concern. it’s a pseudo-anonymous handle i have come across a few times. previous context indicates someone who is online more often than not. precious...

growing up, i only paid attention to proper casing when creating documents or writing an email. for instant messaging, i used all lowercase. then smartphones took off and autocapitalization made it something to not worry about… until i realized i probably didn’t want to give away what device i’m on when chatting with people. why should they rightfully guess i’m on my laptop when i text in lowercase when i can make things ambiguous by always texting in lowercase?

so i turned off autocapitalization.

over time, a framework emerged to tell my lowercase writing apart from appropriately cased ones. the former signified a stream-of-consciousness articulation, while the latter implied formal comms.

i plan to publish more in the new year, and one way i intend on making it less of an aspiration is to occasionally share slightly longer form versions of the kind of thoughts that inform my...

on june 9 2020, i cut my locs. it wasn’t just another haircut - this was a decade of my life in my hands. it was peak lockdown season and people worldwide were forced to introspect and make big life decisions. for a lot of people, this meant cutting their hair, for others, it was learning to make banana bread, but i digress.

my loc journey started in 2010 - about two years before i officially went to the salon to get it done properly. i had stopped using my comb and wore caps most of the time. over time, i had locs free-forming at the back of my head, and after rocking the look for a bit, i had it done right. i started out with interlocking, but i quickly switched to palm rolling.

when paystack got accepted into ycombinator in 2015, my cofounder and i moved to the bay area for a few months. i no longer had access to my usual loctitian and finding one in white people country wasn’t...

Every Sunday, you’ll likely find my friend Tolu at brunch somewhere. She might be at Eric Kayser alone, catching up with a former colleague at Pitstop, or hosting close-knit friends at her apartment in Victoria Island. It was no surprise that when she came to spend the weekend at mine sometime in February 2021, she was itching for us to go out to brunch on Sunday. Another friend of mine was around at the time, and we collectively agreed to spend our Sunday morning at Orchid Bistro, Ikeja GRA.

We spent the time talking about anything and everything, catching up on our individual travails, and running commentary on the food. A colleague of mine was scheduled to visit me that day, so she joined us at Orchid Bistro instead. I appreciated how chill and relaxing the outing went and commented on how I’d love to experience it more often. The only problem was that regularly leaving my house...

My first memorable experience with a well-designed and functional network was in 2009 at the African University of Science and Technology (Abuja). My friend, @bigbrovar, designed and built the network, and was its sole administrator.

Speaking of the network being very functional, I am referring to the breadth of services running within the network that needed to be kept alive. The university assigned laptops to students. These laptops ran a custom Linux distro (also put together by my friend) and, at some point, loaded the user’s home directory off the network, making it possible for students to login to their desktop profile on any school-issued computer they can find. There was also some caching setup in place such that any HTTP download is done once over the internet and subsequently on the network, dramatically cutting down bandwidth requirements for system updates, etc. I used to...

My earliest participation in distributed computing systems was installing SETI@home on my computer in the early 2000s. Short for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence”, SETI@home at the time was essentially a screensaver that leveraged idle computing power to analyze data captured from the Arecibo Telescope to detect signs of intelligent life outside our planet.

The project failed to detect evidence of life outside earth. However, it proved that it is possible to leverage volunteer computers worldwide for scientific research, giving researchers more options beyond buying time on specialized supercomputers for their work. SETI@home also evolved from a single-purpose screensaver into the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). This system matched volunteer computers with various projects that could use the spare compute.

Enter Folding@home

Like SETI@home...

Ever since I had my Twitter handle changed to @0x back in January of 2010, I have been no stranger to attempts at stealing the account off me. First, it was seemingly lame password reset attempts - I got the emails, and simply ignored them, and then it escalated to straight up demands to surrender the address via subtle threats in my DMs.

Sometime in 2018, someone succeeded in breaching my old and abandoned yahoo email account and then emailed me from the address, asking me to change my Twitter password to a specific text, along with what to set the new email address on the account to. I didn’t respond - he later reached out via DM threatening to leak compromising pictures he had in his possession from the breach.

I didn’t think I had anything to be worried about. My security sense is definitely not fort knox level but at least, I had all the bases covered - I use a password...