When Ayodele Samuel Adebayo leads engineering discussions across time zones today, it’s easy to forget that his first lines of code were written on a phone, timed between power outages and thirty-minute cybercafé sessions. His story is not just about learning to code; it’s about how community, visibility, and constraint can substitute for privilege in modern tech careers.
Adebayo did not grow up thinking he would become a software engineer. Like many people his age, his earliest memories of technology were not about code or systems, but about curiosity.
He first encountered computers while he was in secondary school. By SS2, there was already a computer at home, and his relationship with it was casual at first, as he played games and explored what the machine could do. At the time, it was just another household device, not a career path.
What shifted his perspective was exposure. A cousin based in Estonia, working as a software engineer, would occasionally post about programming, particularly Python, and about building things with code. Watching someone close to him actively work in tech made the field feel tangible rather than abstract. “That was what sparked my interest in programming,” he recalls.
He began experimenting on his own, starting with the basics: HTML and CSS. There was no formal structure or long-term plan at this point, just curiosity and the desire to understand how things worked.
That early curiosity quietly laid the groundwork for everything that followed. Seeking structure, Adebayo applied to a six-month coding institute, TIIDELab, to learn frontend engineering. There, his team won the Best Project Award, and he graduated as the top-performing student in his cohort.
Shortly after the programme, he discovered Hashnode, where he participated in hackathons and won some. However, what began as a casual participation introduced him to a different way of learning, building in public, sharing progress openly, and improving through feedback from a global community, marking the beginning of what would become a full-fledged career in software engineering.
Turning curiosity into real work
For Adebayo, hackathons were not just side activities. They were the bridge between curiosity and professional work.
“That was how my journey began. Those events opened my eyes to a lot of opportunities in terms of making content, building projects, and learning in public.”
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Through consistent participation, his work started to stand out in the Hashnode community. That visibility eventually led to his first role at the company, but not as a software engineer.
By the time he joined the company, Hashnode was no longer a small developer blog platform. It had crossed two million users and tens of millions of posts, and the scale was beginning to show cracks. Support tickets were piling up faster than they could be resolved. There were over one thousand unresolved issues in the backlog, and the customer support function was severely under-resourced.
“I joined Hashnode as a developer relations engineer. When I joined, user support was messy. There were more than one thousand backlogs, and they didn’t allocate a lot of resources to it.”
Every user complaint became a signal. Slow page loads, broken dashboards, inconsistent behaviour across features, these were not isolated bugs, but symptoms of a platform struggling to keep up with its own growth. Responding to users daily helped him see the product through their eyes.
“That made me actually understand what users need, what is broken, and what they want to see in the product.”
Because he could read and reason about the codebase, Adebayo began translating user frustration into actionable engineering insight. Rather than passing vague reports upstream, he broke issues down to likely failure points, reproduction steps, and architectural constraints. “Engineers didn’t have to spend extra time debugging from scratch.”
Soon after, he was promoted to a software engineering role. One of his first major assignments as an engineer was the core Hashnode dashboard, the part of the product where users spent most of their time.
By then, scale had turned performance into a business risk. As the user base grew, the dashboard became increasingly slow, threatening both retention and trust. His transition came with new technical demands.
“Working with a large codebase and large datasets was an eye-opener for me. It really shaped how I think about building systems at scale.”
That phase marked a turning point. Hashnode was where Adebayo moved from learning in public to building production systems used by millions, and from writing code in isolation to making decisions that affected an entire ecosystem of developers.
Building systems that scale
For Adebayo, achievement in tech is less about titles and more about impact. “As our user base grew, the existing dashboard and infrastructure started getting slower.”
To address this, Adebayo and two other engineers formed a small sub-team focused on performance. Their goal was straightforward but technically demanding: make the dashboard fast again, even as the platform continued to scale.
“Taking a platform from being slow because of scale to becoming very fast is one of my biggest achievements there.”
The experience went beyond performance optimisation. It deepened his understanding of how real-world systems behave under pressure and what it takes to build infrastructure that can support millions of users without breaking down.
Working on a global scale from Africa
Adebayo’s experience reflects a broader transformation in global engineering teams. African engineers are increasingly building and maintaining systems used worldwide, often in environments with fewer resources and weaker infrastructure than those of their counterparts elsewhere.
Beyond Hashnode, his work began to gain recognition outside the private sector. He was selected by the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) to train directors from Nigerian government ministries on artificial intelligence.
“I was recognised to come and train the directors of ministries in Nigeria about AI for leaders.”
The programme ran for four weeks, and for him, it was a reminder that technical expertise could extend beyond products and startups into leadership and policy spaces.
Government engagement with practitioners like Adebayo signals another shift: policy is beginning to catch up with practice. Training ministry directors in AI and digital leadership reflects a growing awareness that governance, regulation, and public services must evolve alongside technical talent.
Still, the next challenge is coordination. Programmes like 3MTT will only reach their full potential if paired with stronger industry partnerships, structured apprenticeships and open-source pipelines, incentives for global companies to hire locally, and support for communities that help developers “learn in public,” as Adebayo did. Without these bridges, scale risks producing credentials without careers.
In his current role, Adebayo serves as a software engineer and team lead, a position that reflects the trust built through his earlier work. He now leads a distributed team spread across India and the US, and he is the only Nigerian on the team.
“My achievements are really about the work I’ve done that helped platforms scale.”
Building through limitations, then looking ahead
For all his progress, Adebayo’s journey into tech was shaped as much by limitations as by opportunity. One of his earliest challenges was infrastructure. When he started learning to code, access to basic tools was inconsistent.
“There was little to no electricity, and what we had was a desktop and not a laptop.”
When his computer stopped working in the early stages of his coding, he turned to cybercafés. He paid about ₦200 for thirty minutes of access, using the time to write as much code as he could.
“I was coding on my phone. I had notes where I wrote things down, and anytime I had access to a cybercafé, that’s when I coded.”
Those constraints forced discipline. When he eventually got consistent access to better tools, the transition felt dramatic. “Moving from coding on a phone to having a laptop changed everything.”
School also became a point of tension. As his involvement in hackathons and real-world projects deepened, school started to feel like an anchor. Eventually, he made the difficult decision to drop out and focus fully on tech. “If I had to do it again, I would drop out again for what I have now.”
Now, as a team lead, he is learning to balance execution with delegation and to focus on outcomes rather than volume. A major turning point in his growth came through writing. With no job at the start of his career, Adebayo began documenting what he was learning.
“I started technical writing for my future self,” he says. That habit sharpened his clarity. Breaking complex ideas into simple explanations became a strength, one that later shaped his engineering and leadership style. In 2023, he set a personal challenge: to write 100 technical posts in a year.
Another habit that shaped his career was visibility. Adebayo made a conscious effort to share his work on his blog, LinkedIn, X, and even WhatsApp status updates.
“Putting myself out there is what gave me most of my jobs.” He notes that he has never gone through a traditional interview process for many of his roles. Today, Adebayo sees himself at a transition point. He is no longer just executing tasks; he is contributing to decisions, mentoring others, and shaping direction.
“I’m now sitting in rooms where we deliberate on what we want to do as a team.”
That shift has also expanded his sense of responsibility. Outside of his full-time work, he teaches people how to code, co-organises hackathons, and mentors early-career developers.
Looking ahead, Adebayo is focused on building tools that make developers’ lives easier. His goal is not just to build technology, but to make it feel human, even in an AI-driven world.
Adebayo’s journey, from coding on a phone to leading distributed engineering teams, is not just a personal triumph. It is a case study in how African tech talent emerges despite constraints, and how quickly this can compound once connected to global systems.
As Africa’s developer population grows and government programmes expand, the next decade will be defined less by training numbers and more by global integration. If talent pipelines align with real work, Africa’s engineers will not only build global products, they will help redefine the continent’s role in the world economy, turning code into one of its most valuable exports.
In that future, stories like Adebayo’s will no longer feel remarkable. They will feel inevitable.
