What is in a String... In Go
Understanding how strings work in Go: memory management, immutability, and why every concatenation is an allocation, with practical patterns to fix it.
Saturday, February 28, 2026 Independent Writing
5error
Software, stories, and the world they're built in.
The day the internet run out of addresses
The story of how IPv4 exhaustion nearly broke the internet, the hacks that held it together (NAT, CIDR, address markets), and what three decades of IPv6 delays teach us about technical debt.
Redis
Redis is fast because it's simple: in-memory, single-threaded, and purpose-built. But its use cases are narrower than most engineers assume, and its durability tradeoffs are poorly understood.
Sharing Crazy Bold Ideas
In high school, pitching a GTA-style game set in Accra got laughs, and a few people paying close attention. Sharing bold ideas, even the ones that fail, leaves a mark.
The Difficult Truth about Mentorship
One-on-one mentorship is a luxury most early-career African developers can't access. The honest answer isn't to chase a mentor. It's to find your community.
A scalable development process - Part 1
Scaling your codebase is secondary to scaling your team's process. Five things your development workflow needs before your app ever needs to handle load.
The state of payment apps in Ghana 2019
Ghana has dozens of payment startups competing on a broken foundation. More apps won't fix the infrastructure. That requires political will, not more venture capital.
Golang style error handling pattern in Javascript
Try-catch buries error handling at the bottom of your logic. Here's how to borrow Go's tuple-return pattern and handle errors right where they happen.
I moved my blog from Medium, here is why
Medium's partner program requires a Stripe account. Stripe isn't available in most of Africa. That quietly excludes African writers from the algorithm. So I left.
How to not build your application
Seven hard-won lessons for first-time product builders: ship fast, resist feature requests, outsource ruthlessly. Technology scales a solution. It does not create one.
The kenkey attitude
Kenkey is a fermented Ghanaian staple. Eat it at lunch and you are, technically, drinking on the job.
Take a step back. Grow up for a second.
Before writing a single line of code, ask whether the solution is actually an app. The most dangerous instinct in software is reaching for code before thinking.
Open sourcing Ambre
Ambre was a mobile feedback tool with real traction. When Doorbell and Instabug made it irrelevant, the right move was to open source it.
The Idea
A noisy WhatsApp exam group and a frustrated class prefect sparked the idea for Chanl, a cleaner way for groups to communicate.
Define happiness
A visit to Wli, a farming village in Ghana's Volta Region, raises a quiet question: what does happiness actually mean to you, and are you living by that answer?
Trash Apps from Africa
African apps fail not because of where they're made, but because code alone isn't enough. A challenge to put design, UX, and the user first.