Star Developer Series: Stephen Afam-Osemene

Stephen is a Software Engineer formerly working at hotels.ng, he now leads Developer Relations at Africa’s talking. He shared his story with us on our slack channel. Here is his story ->

Good evening everyone ***clears throat***

My name is Stephen Afam-Osemene, I don’t think my story is particularly interesting.

I hope that having to tell this story will make me reflect on where I’ve come from and inspire both myself and a few other people

Well, first off, I’ve always been an “intelligent boy”

I was always the youngest in my class, I always had good grades but hardly ever read. All I had to do was sit in the first row and listen.

My notes were hardly complete, except for mathematics (which was my favorite subject)

I did not know that computers will be a major part of my life, but I remember that the only time I ever got 100/100 was in JS2 computer science. That was also the only time when all the tests and exams were practical. As in “do this while the teacher watches”

Anyways, fast forward to SS2, and like any other “intelligent” student, I was implicitly expected to go read medicine, this was also true because both my elder siblings (I’m the last child) were reading Medicine.

But one look at their zoology textbooks was enough to make me realize that I didn’t want to keep reading anything similar to biology. I loved calculations.

Also, in SS2, I won 2 state competitions for mathematics, and feeling like a super human calculator, I decided to go read mechanical engineering

As with many others, I realized somethings in UNIBEN

1. I could not consistently get good grades without putting in the work

2. It’s a lot smarter to read to pass

3. I did not see the usefulness of most of what I was being taught

Safe to say, I wasn’t a big fan of school

I loved engineering though. Even more when I realized that mechanical engineering was not about repairing cars or tractors, but more about designing machines.

We would constantly marvel over engineering spectacles, and I can’t still help myself from admiring any lovely piece of engineering I come across

So during my 6 months IT, I was eagerly looking forward to working on real life engineering projects. However, on getting to the company, the plant was down and I was told it would soon be fixed.

I listened to the workers telling me how it was, and was eagerly looking forward to it

3 months into my IT, the plant was still down.

I was so disillusioned, I started being a terrible employee. This is not an excuse though.

I started spending most of my time reading manga, playing chess and reading books

One of the books I read was “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kyosaki. Then my entrepreneurial fire was ignited!!!!

I started constantly thinking of ideas, businesses, investments. I still think of these

Many of the ideas were “not so good” but still

A time came when I was tired of imagining and hypothesizing, I was ready to implement one.

In hindsight, it was a fatally flawed idea.

Get full rights on beats from a producer, and then sub-licence it to multiple artists at a much lower fee. Since I can sub-licence it unlimited times, it felt like I would purchase inventory once and sell it forever, like mining gold!

So I bought the domain name beatsforever.com (didn’t renew the domain)

Created a facebook page facebook.com/beats4ever, twitter handle (closed) and started working on my idea.

I had arranged to buy the beats from a local producer, but what I could not afford was someone to build the site. I didn’t even know anyone that did such

So I decided to build it myself.

Bought hosting from inmotionhosting.com, installed WordPress, and started figuring it all out

That’s how I entered this web development world

Long story short, after about a year of trying, it was obvious it was not going to work. I never even made a single sale.

I realized I had a lot to learn so I needed mentors

I finished school, started planning for masters and possible businesses, and started waiting for NYSC

I wanted to start building some sort of online identity to attract web development work as a “side hustle”, so I bought stephenafamo.com, got the email stephenafamo@gmail.com, changed all my social media handles to stephenafamo, created a facebook page called facebook.com/stephenafamo

I installed WordPress, heavily customised it, started blogging as some sort of content marketing, did a 3 episode podcast. Was basically shooting in the dark

Now during NYSC, I started cyber stalking mentors.

If I could not get in contact with them to mentor me physically, I would gain some knowledge from what I see out there

I also sent cold emails to a few of them, including Mark Essien and Jason Njoku.

Only Jason replied, but never replied again

I’m trying to keep this chronological, but a lot of stuff was happening during NYSC

I built a web portal for the school I was teaching at

I tried to create a platform for inspiring content nigeriainspired.com (didn’t last)

I tried to create some sort of ecommerce platform, sort of like shopify, but powered by WordPress Multisite and WooCommerce (proudly.com.ng)

please help include years to your story

Yeah

IT — May — Oct 2013

Beats Forever — Aug 2014 — Aug 2015

NYSC — Oct 2015 — Oct 2016

All these were between January to July 2016

I’m trying to keep this chronological, but a lot of stuff was happening during NYSC

I built a web portal for the school I was teaching at

I tried to create a platform for inspiring content nigeriainspired.com (didn’t last)

I tried to create some sort of ecommerce platform, sort of like shopify, but powered by WordPress Multisite and WooCommerce (proudly.com.ng)

So during all my stalking, I came across Mark Essien’s tweet about the remote internship. The very first one.

This was Mid August, 2016

I was very eager to join. Not because I was big on programming and web development at the time, but because I wanted to observe Mark more closely. Afterall, he was already unknowingly mentoring me.

During the internship, I tried to do as much as I could. I volunteered to do everything. This was a habit I had picked up during my NYSC camp, and it paid off

While it was incredibly stressful, it was even worse for those that were incharge of teams.

As at week 2, I was in charge of a team, I think it was called “backend admin”. @shalvah was incharge of “database team”

By week 3 or so, we needed a “project manager” and as with all things, I volunteered

It was one of the best experiences in my life. Although it was also very easily the most stressful.

I was staying up till 4am, to make sure everything was going well, while I had to do my regular NYSC duties during the day.

I often slept in my viewing center cause my lodge had power issues. (BTW I and a couple other corpers started and ran a viewing center)

I and the other team leaders had to take the fall for anything that went wrong, resolve issues, and interface with Mark

That was very fulfilling for me cause I was keenly observing how Mark managed stuff

During my POP, October 6th 2016, Mark offered me a full time role at Hotels.ng, and that how I got my first job

Of course I was elated cause that meant closer observation of Mark, I also made it clear to him that I wanted him to mentor me, which he agreed to.

While I was selfishly pursuing my goal of gaining a mentor, I had greatly improved my programming skills.

As a team leader, you also had to put in your points, so we were doing as much as anyone else

However, people would somehow assume you know more and bring their problems to you which you have to help them solve.

We had to do lots of research to make certain decisions, we had to fix horrible merge conflicts. I also had to manage the Digital Ocean droplet. I learnt a lot during those 3 months.

Without that internship, I probably would not have gotten as deep into software development as I have.

First, with WordPress, as I did more stuff, I had to start writing PHP to do custom coding

For the school portal, I did all the stuff myself,

User roles, upload/download of results, calculation of scores, keeping student data, generating PDFs,

It’s the internship that really forced me to learn a lot of stuff

Git, server management, MVC patterns, proper object oriented code,

When I started full time at Hotels.ng, I started using Laravel, Docker, more server management.

What I understood about my learning process is that I learn very fast, but only when I *need* to learn.

So to learn something new now, I put myself in a position where I need to use that thing, That way, I need to learn it

The best thing about the Hotels.ng environment is that a lot of the times, you will be asked to do things you don’t yet know how to. It’s really a learning roller coaster. And It has helped me immensely

Anyways, I decided to leave Hotels.ng in September 2017. I wanted a new environment, where I needed new skills, and I’ll learn even more.

which means your work at Hotels.ng was much based on dedication, ability to learn new things and commitment than your previously acquired skills.

In October I joined Africa’s Talking to Lead Developer Relations in Nigeria.

It’s funny cause I am no longer coding as my day time job. At least I don’t need to.

It’s now about showing developers the APIs that Africa’s Talking makes available.

I accepted it because.

1. I will still code. I will create libraries, demos, tutorials, e.t.c.

2. I will have to learn a lot. Code in numerous languages, build many different types of applications

3. I strongly believe Africa’s Talking is providing an AWESOME service, and I am very happy to be associated with it.

4. I get to learn a lot about the business as a whole since I am basically a sales person

5. I would have done it anyways. Anyone that knows me knows how much I can advocate for the things I love, which I would have lowkey advocated for Africa’s Talking anyway. So it’s like paying me to do nothing special

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t think my story is anything special.

it just a guy who

Started building websites because he couldn’t pay for it

Started coding websites cause he got paid for it

Got a lot better at it while chasing a separate goal

You could say the programmer life chose me. I had absolutely no idea I would end up here.

That’s it!

You can reach out Stephen on twitter stephenafamo or just send message to him on slack.

Thank you Stephen for your awesome story.

From Hamza Bashir, Tinuade Adeleke and Mayomi Ayandiran.

For Consonance Africa.