About

I’m Jide. I make software for the internet, and I’ve been doing it for over a decade.

I started in Lagos in 2013, building enterprise systems nobody outside the building ever saw — asset management, visitor logs, an ATM battery-monitoring platform that taught me more about reliability than any book has since. Then Softcom, building for MTN and a government learning platform serving a couple of hundred thousand volunteers. Then Andela, which is where I learned to work with people I’d never met in person and to care properly about how a service is designed rather than just whether it responds.

Since 2019 I’ve been at GetYourGuide, now as a Senior Software Engineer in the Catalog team. Before that I spent years on Reviews, where I owned the domain — a good problem to own: 360 million requests a day, 30 million reviews, and a genuine product question sitting underneath all of it — how do you help someone trust a stranger’s account of an experience they haven’t had yet?

How I work

I sit between product and engineering on purpose. I want to be in the room where we decide what to build, working it through with product managers, and then I want to own the technical side properly — the architecture, the data model, the migration, the on-call rotation. I’ve never found those two halves to be in tension. Knowing why something is being built has changed how I’d build it more times than I can count.

The other half is people. I mentor the engineers I work with, run design reviews across teams, and I’ve built the case for someone’s promotion. If I’m honest it’s the part of the work I’m most attached to. Systems get replaced; engineers you helped early tend to remember it.

Outside work I’m building Propklar in the evenings, which is its own kind of education.

Elsewhere in my life

I run and I cycle, mostly to think. I play piano, badly enough to enjoy it and well enough to keep going. I take pictures — a photo diary at Pause and wonder — and I write about living deliberately at Diary of the Brave.

I’m a husband and a father. Based in Germany.

If any of that is worth a conversation, say hello.