I don't have a single clear memory of the first time I fell in love with technology. And I've thought about this a lot. Most people can point to a moment — a specific computer, a specific game, a specific person who showed them something that changed everything. I can't. Because for as far back as I can remember, it was just always there. The obsession. Like it came with me.
What I do remember are the movies.
Growing up, I would watch those FBI and CIA thrillers — the ones where someone sits in front of a screen and just seems to bend the digital world to their will. There was one in particular. Nikita. There was a character — Beckhoff — who I was so fascinated by that I watched the entire thing three times as an adult just to study him. The way he moved through systems. The quiet authority of someone who understood something most people didn't. That was the life I wanted. Not for the thrill of it. But because of what it represented — a person who could build, break, and understand the invisible architecture of the world.
I wanted to be that person. Badly.
The Phone I Wasn't Allowed to Have
The rule in my house was simple: no phone until you finish secondary school. Which meant I spent years watching other people have the one thing I wanted most. Friends with gadgets I could only admire from a distance. It was painful in a way that's hard to explain unless you've felt it — that specific frustration of wanting to learn, wanting to explore, but not having the tools in your hands.
So I found other ways.
I would wait until late at night — quietly, patiently — until my parents had fallen asleep. Then I would sneak out my mother's phone and use it to browse, to read, to explore whatever I could find. In school, I would save my lunch money just to buy internet subscription on a friend's phone so they'd let me use it. Sometimes they'd still cut me off after a few minutes. I ate a lot of insults just for access.
Eventually, someone close to our family got me a Bontel phone. It felt like the world had finally handed me something I'd been waiting for. I used it to learn everything I could. Then my parents found it and seized it. They said I'd get it back after my JSS3 exams. When I finally went looking for it after the exams — I found it already damaged.
I think my parents knew what I was capable of. And they didn't know how to manage that with a powerful tool in my hands.
I don't say that with bitterness. They saw something in me — that obsession, that intensity — and they didn't have a framework for it. So they tried to contain it. What they didn't realise was that containing it only made it look for other ways out.
I built themes on a Nokia Asha 200. I explored Net Object Fusion. I read about HTML on borrowed phones in borrowed minutes. Not because someone sat me down and showed me. But because curiosity doesn't wait for permission.
Three Years Learning the Wrong Thing
When I finished secondary school, I had two things I wanted: to study computers or get a white collar job. My parents wanted neither. My elder brother had gone into fashion design, built a small shop, was doing okay. The plan was for me to follow him.
I stayed for almost two years.
And I want to be honest about something: I did learn. I could sew. I could put pieces together and make them work. But there is a difference between doing something and being alive while you're doing it. My younger brother would finish four, five, six pieces in a day. I would barely finish two. While he was experimenting with styles and genuinely enjoying the craft — I was just surviving the hours.
My heart was somewhere else entirely. It always was.
July 11, 2022
Through my elder brother — with whom I'd eventually built a much better relationship — I got connected to someone I now call my boss. He needed someone with a technical mind, someone he could bring alongside him on projects. My brother mentioned me. We arranged to meet in Warri.
I remember sitting across from him in his office. He told me he wanted me to come to Warri, stay there, learn computer repairs, get deep into the tech life. And then he said something that has stayed with me. He told me to mark that day on the calendar. That it would be the day my life changed.
I did mark it.
I moved to Warri on the 16th. He took me to the shop on the 17th. And everything that has happened in my career since then traces back to that decision, that man, that city.
He introduced me to ChatGPT. He recently bought me a course on agentic AI — $108. He's planning for us to build training programmes together. Some people walk into your life and quietly reroute its entire direction. He is that person for me.
The Voice I Still Fight
I want to be honest about something that I don't think many self-taught developers talk about openly enough.
I still struggle with self-confidence. Not always. Not every day. But the voice is there.
It gets loudest in a very specific moment — when I look at everything I can build, every product I've shipped, and then I look at my bank account and the numbers don't match. The highest salary I've ever earned was 50,000 naira. From a teaching job. Not even from tech.
And in those moments, the voice says: maybe if you had a degree, it would be different.
Not all who wander are lost. But wandering alone is exhausting in ways nobody warns you about.
Here's what being self-taught actually means — and I don't think people say this enough: when you go through a structured programme, someone guides you from A to Z. When you are self-taught, you are alone. You decide what to learn next. You decide if what you've learned is enough. You decide when you're ready — and you're never fully sure.
I once dated a girl who had a BSc in Mathematics Education. My mother asked me how I could be with someone who went to university when I hadn't. I told her I couldn't be intimidated by a certificate. I know what I can do. And that same girl — after watching me build — told me: "The things you build, even computer science students in university cannot do what you've done."
I held onto that. I still do.
What I Know Now
I've built mobile apps. Web apps. AI integrations. A trust infrastructure platform — Zolarux — that handles vendor verification, escrow payments, and dispute mediation for social commerce in Nigeria. I taught myself Flutter. I've shipped production apps with real users. I only recently got admission into university — years after I'd already started building real things.
I use AI as a force multiplier. Not as a replacement for skill, but as an accelerant. Where I used to spend weeks watching tutorials, I now learn in days. Where I used to write everything from scratch, I now build three times faster — and spend my energy where it actually matters. The architecture. The logic. The product decisions. The things that separate a builder from someone who just writes code.
But here's the honest part — the part I'm still working on:
I can build. What I'm still learning is how to sell. How to show up consistently. How to turn what I know into what I earn. The gap between skill and income is usually not a talent problem. It's a visibility problem. A consistency problem. A marketing problem.
That's why I'm here. Writing this. Showing up. Building in public.
I'm self-taught. No degree — at least not yet. From Nigeria. Still learning every single day. Still growing into the person my obsession always believed I could become.
And I am proud — genuinely, deeply proud — of every borrowed phone, every late night, every seized gadget, every fashion design stitch, every frustrating moment that somehow kept pointing me back to the same thing.
The obsession never left. I just finally stopped apologising for it.