In recent weeks, my thoughts were frequently interrupted by different questions. These questions can easily be framed in the form of “how did I get here?”.
Well to take away your unease, “here” is not a bad place. It’s great actually, although slightly different from what I had imagined I’d be doing with my life but waay better.
Here? (Kinda)
Whenever I try to answer this question, I am led back to the day in October 2011, when I walked into the 6th floor of a building in Yaba. I’m not great at remembering things, but this memory stuck out.
The walls had a lot of bright colors. It was really pretty, the most beautiful room I had ever been in. Immediately, even though I didn’t know what exactly they did here, I knew I wanted to belong.
There were chairs arranged in the right corner of the floor and a man was addressing the people seated. I don’t remember a lot of what he said. I know he talked about the different challenges people in Lagos faced with accessing clean water and together with the attendees was listing out possible solutions. I didn’t say much during the session — maybe because I was still soaking in the environment.
Listening to him made me feel me hope. I felt like I could do something that could significantly change my country. Even though I didn’t say much (doubt I said anything at all), I signed up to participate in something called a hackathon.
His name is Femi Longe and the 6th floor is Co-Creation Hub.
I am not one of them.
At the event I joined a group, and during the introduction, people at the table reeled out their proficiencies. They were all programmers who used CakePHP or wrote Django and I was scared. It wasn’t my imposter syndrome shining, going by what they said they could do, I simply wasn’t good enough.
Prior to meeting them, I already knew I wasn’t that great a developer. Make no mistake, in my 1+ year of PHP development, I had built a tool that was used (and still in use) by an oil & gas company to track & manage their accounts + inventory. And it worked great!
My fear & perceived inadequacy was because I had tried to transition from a linear PHP developer to OOP + MVCs and I struggled with the concept. I couldn’t get on with CakePHP or Zend. I resigned to my fate and got on with my life.
Today, I was going to be found out as a fraud. I was scared!
Designer
I was the last on the introduction sequence. Finally it got to my turn, I had to introduce myself and say what I was going to contribute to the team. I simply said: “…since nobody was going to design it, I will” Ogechi offered to help, and we set out on the task.
I’ve always appreciated good visual design and my trigger to become a “programmer” started because I felt websites were awful and I felt I could do better. I knew I could do that part of the job. Note, I didn’t call myself a designer; I just said I’ll do the job of a designer.
Over the next couple of days together with people I met at the hackathon event, we built something we called Mairuwa.
Mairuwa
Mairuwa was a tool that helped users identify and report broken pipes in their neighborhood. The data is then sent to a central dashboard where Lagos State Water Authority staff can see the details of the damage: type, location, description, and take action.
Meeting Bosun
About 2 weeks after the hackathon, I got an email from someone named 'Bosun Tijani. I didn’t remember him from the hackathon but the most exciting news from the e-mail was that he liked the Mairuwa design and had asked around for the designer.
We met a couple of weeks later, at the 6th floor. We both sat on the couch facing the TV and chatted. Mostly about me, school, my interest in design and finally the project. I didn’t know it at the time, not sure he did. That meeting marked the beginning of a change in my life and my journey with Co-Creation Hub.
This is a first in a series of essays by me. Everything I share will be recollections of events and conversations that helped shape me. I want to tell my story, my experiences, my truth.
