Coding our Way to a Better Life.

I’ve always being that sorta person, the kind that sees potential beauty in something seemingly ugly. In these situations, I can’t help myself from wanting to jump in and begin building to achieve the beauty I imagine.

Now this might seem like a great personality trait to have, not the kind one should complain about. But in my experience, it’s not as great as it sounds. For one, it turns out that some problems are of such magnitude that no matter how much effort you put into building, it’s never nearly enough to make a difference at a scale that would really matter.

I guess that’s what led me to coding in the first place. If you think about it, a photographer interested in tutoring newbies could set up a classroom and invite people. At the very best she can manage to train around 50 people at once per day. Now, imagine there was an online video sharing app, maybe it’s called YouTube. If our photographer made videos of the training sessions and uploaded them to YouTube, now with the same effort she can reach hundreds of millions of people. Our banks can process transactions 10 times faster without the customer having to even visit the bank. The taxi driver can sit tight and wait for riders nearby to hail him on the uber app rather than driving about, burning fuel hoping for the best.

This is why I think information technology is the new gold, coders and all the players involved in the software development cycle are the new gold miners. It has this multiplier effect, providing existing solutions to many more people, creating new solutions to problems we never knew existed. Giving a very average guy like me a chance at making a difference in the world I live in.

So yes I’m counting on IT, one line of code on top of another we will build up Nigeria and Africa into a beautiful future.