The last time I felt compelled to publish a reflection on my year was in 2015 here. It was a story of misplaced trust, financial ruin, a career that had bottomed out, and the work of learning to trust myself again. It also signaled the beginning of a new chapter and heralded the birth of Paystack. Today, I’m writing a somewhat similar story.

While the 2015 piece spent multiple paragraphs exploring the aforementioned themes, I will not be expatiating on those in this one. I’m however glad I’m not 40 yet because, you know what they say about fools in their 40s.

Regardless of how turbulent the last few weeks of 2025 were, it was a year of building things I’m proud of.

Wrote Published more

I spent 2023 and 2024 wailing about how little I was publishing. It wasn’t for lack of things to write about. Quite the opposite in fact. I document my life and thoughts religiously. For example, a...

Over the past few days, my name and reputation, built over years as co-founder and technical leader at Paystack, have been called into question because of information circulating online. In response, the Board of Directors of Paystack placed me on suspension and initiated what was described as an “independent” investigation.

Once that process began, I chose not to make any public statements. I did this to avoid interfering with the investigation and because I expected a fair, thorough and unbiased review of the allegations being discussed online. This created a vacuum that allowed assumptions and misrepresentations to spread without challenge.

Those who know me personally or professionally understand that the posts being circulated do not reflect my conduct or the way I have lived my life. I have always, to the best of my ability, conducted myself in a manner that respects everyone’s...

okay guys, it’s time to board an ibom air flight heading to lagos from akwa ibom. these are the various individuals i’m doomed to interact with.

• person who checks that the name on my boarding pass matches my passport or identification document
• person who tears away the larger part of the pass, leaving me with the stub
• person who punches a hole in the stub
• person who pats me down
• person who checks the stub at the foot of the aircraft
• person who checks the stub when you climb into the aircraft

phew!

this silly behavior is rampant especially in government-adjacent parastatals within the country. it’s like someone gets a job creation mandate and is told they get points for coming up with the most asinine approach to solving the problem. i mean, someone to hole punch my boarding pass stub? calling it absurd doesn’t begin to cut it.

the federal government recently announced plans to...

it’s 2025 and building for the world has never been easier. when existing global solutions create a gap by excluding africa, resist the urge to build “for africa”. make it global from day one.

incumbents ignore the continent for reasons including but not limited to low gdp per capita, scarce growth capital, structural barriers to scale, etc. build only for africa and you’ll inherit these constraints. your ceiling is baked in before you start.

instead, leverage your unfair advantage: you understand what works in african markets. use that knowledge to design a solution that scales globally while working exceptionally well in contexts others overlook. use africa as your proof of concept for global resilience, not your total addressable market.

build for the world, informed by the gap.

i spent time in early 2024 with someone who frequently took notes on their phone using voice dictation. it was quite a thing to observe, as i’d always thought speech to text was shit. the inability to detect nuances in language, the frequent errors in or outright absence of punctuation. take a look at your average iphone voice note transcription to see what i mean.

however, this person was quite methodical with their approach. they read out the punctuations, including where they wanted to start a new paragraph, or put things in bullet points. i found it extremely fascinating - working one’s way around the obvious problem by way of adaptation.

i take a lot of notes. i am constantly pulling out my phone and typing out my thoughts, or writing out a reflection such as this one in my journal. while i admired the ability to be precise with dictation, i figured i will soon be able to leverage...

hollow and resonant, an empty barrel amplifies the slightest disturbance into thunderous din, while the full one, dense with substance, absorbs sound. the gunsmiths of yore could identify mis-loaded weapons by ear, and noisy kegs betrayed their vacuity to brewers. today, we’ve built the ultimate resonance chamber in our interconnected feeds, where the emptiest voices carry furthest, their algorithmic amplification mistaken for authority, and their volume confused with validity.

disturbingly, an entire generation is learning to mistake amplitude for depth of insight. chronically online and impressionable minds, hungry for understanding in an increasingly complex world, are being systematically trained that sophistication is weakness, nuance is indecision, and that the person shouting the loudest must know something they don’t. platforms reward this with engagement metrics, and...

tj holowaychuk is someone i will like to meet one day. when i discovered him in 2013/4, he was active in the nodejs community and was the creator of the express framework, the koa framework, and a host of javascript modules in use by tons of software developers today.

a few years later, he decided to take a step back from active open source development and started an uptime monitoring startup called apex.

earlier today, a friend reached out to ask what was wrong with my media server. before i could respond, they confirmed it was back up. i noted that i didn’t receive any downtime notification and remarked that this was a case for me to extend my homelab to the cloud - maybe a small digital ocean droplet, and use that to monitor my home network’s reachability from the outside world.

then i remembered apex. i visited the domain and saw that the website was unavailable. this led me to...

yesterday around half past 10pm, i took a break from a rebuild of atlas (more on this in a future post) to have a late dinner and received a dm from a friend who was sharing a humorous tweet that referenced me and my articulation. apparently, the tweet had gathered significant engagement which explained the fresh influx of followers and reactions on a thought i had shared earlier in the day.

a friend had shared some obliviously self-dishonoring perspective she came across on her timeline and was flummoxed. i remarked that there’s probably a straightforward explanation, saying i think because people can now have their foolish thoughts expressed with poise (thanks to a proliferation of large language models), those who previously perceived such articulations as being well reasoned will undoubtedly think it’s worthy of sharing. a few minutes later, i posted a version of my reply to my...

should large language models refer to themselves using first person pronouns? i just came across a tweet by uncle bob from 2 days ago arguing that this shouldn’t be allowed. while i agree in principle, i believe we are way past the rubicon now.

very quickly, amidst the ai hype of 2023 and especially 2024, it was inevitable that we will end up here - where chatbots routinely refer to themselves in first person as though they exist in the sense of the word. this is something that would have been brushed off as a gimmick by most a few years ago, but today, a lot of people have moved past (or outright skipped) the “prompting a statistical model” phase and have collectively deluded themselves into the “chatting with a friend”, or even worse the “opening up to my therapist” phase.

whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen. after all, at the core of it all, we are all matching...