Umegbewe “Great” Nwebedu might just be 21 years old, but his cloud infrastructure has supported several global companies.
At six years old, Nwebedu was already redefining what was possible for kids his age.
His father was a computer engineer, so he was around computers daily from an early age. Every day after school, he would visit his father’s office, where he could spend hours playing computer games. It was through one of these games—Marvis Beacon—that he learnt how to type.
“At six years old, I was already typing 35 words per minute. Sometimes, my dad would give me some of his office work to type, and I did not realise that was unusual,” he says.
But this was only a glimpse into the many things he would achieve.
Experimenting with technology
Although technology was present during his childhood, it was in secondary school that Nwebedu developed a deep and sustained engagement with technology-related subjects.
Through a partnership his school had with CISCO and regular Computer Science lessons, he developed an enthusiasm for solving technological problems.
From these lessons, he began programming and building solutions with smallBASIC, a programming language. One of the first tools he designed was a calculator.
“There was a corps member—Mr Suleiman—who was posted to my school. He gave some courses in PHP and HTML. Because he saw I was interested in programming, I got the courses, and two weeks later, I built a football live score website,” Nwebedu says.
In junior secondary school, he set his sights on a career in software engineering and began pursuing it with intensity.
Nwebedu would skip classes to hide in the library and read programming books. He would read programming manuals, copy the programs on paper, and write the code on a computer when he could visit the computer lab.
“At that age, I was in love with programming. It made a lot of sense to me. I thought that if I knew enough, I could build games, and I would not have to play other people’s games.”
Building a career in engineering
Nwebedu began applying his skills right out of secondary school. In his first internship at The Incubator Nigeria, he worked as a software engineer, building mobile applications.
But not long after, he became consumed with solving another kind of problem.
“I realised that it was fun to code, but what about the systems that powered all of these? I really wanted to be in the backend. So, I got into DevOps and site reliability engineering.”
During his gap year between secondary school and university, he was absorbed in courses that expanded his knowledge in the field.
The courses proved beneficial because Nwebedu got a job as a Backend and DevOps Engineer at TCI, which became a crucial learning foundation for his career. At this early stage, it was important for him to unravel and solve problems, and the organisation provided him with the opportunity and resources to do so.
At TCI, Nwebedu built the core infrastructure for Thrift Monkey, a product that enabled people to pool their savings.
“I worked on the backend doing product development, and I also worked on the infrastructure to deploy the backend and the frontend and set up redundancy systems for both.”
The work he did here was crucial to the next phase of his journey at Gala Games, a Web3 company that develops blockchain-based games.
At this point in his career, he was transitioning from a junior engineer to a mid-level engineer, but the role thrust on him responsibilities that sped up his growth and taught him to build systems for scale.
As a site reliability engineer at Gala Games, Nwebedu was tasked with building new infrastructure and migrating the company’s existing blockchain infrastructure to it without downtime.
“When I came in, a lot of things that we did were error-prone. Every time we tried to release a product on the chain, it could take us three months. But building a new infrastructure was a big shift, and it ballooned my career,” Nwebedu says.
The reward for great work is more work, and in Nwebedu’s case, more work came when he joined Botanix Labs, a bitcoin-based blockchain company.
At the time of his entry, the organisation had fully launched its testnet and was preparing to launch its mainnet.
Nwebedu’s work focused primarily on the mainnet launch, where he was part of the engineering team that built an infrastructure that now supports over 1.2 million blocks, over 13 million transactions, over 170 thousand wallets, and has facilitated the deployment of 6,000 smart contracts without a single downtime.
A key part of his work was coordinating all the company’s infrastructure partners to ensure an uninterrupted launch.
“We have 15 partners that run our infrastructure, and a key part of the mainnet launch was that the infrastructure had to come online at the same time. I had to put systems in place to ensure that the process was less error-prone.”
Additionally, he built a system that could track infrastructure errors, address them instantly, and provide metrics and insights into the company’s systems and those connected to its mainnet.
Beyond these roles that showcase his passion for engineering and system fortification, Nwebedu also co-founded Costgraph, a tool that gives companies visibility into their infrastructure spending and pathways to better optimise their infrastructure and cloud budgets.
Looking to the future
A plethora of factors have led Nwebedu throughout his career. From the tools he had access to at a very young age to his drive to solve problems and build tools and systems.
As he continues on his path, he remains eager to build reliable infrastructure that can detect failures and recover automatically.
“I see myself building a stronger blockchain infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure you would expect from the telecommunications industry, where everything has to work. I also see myself building more cost-aware products like Costgraph,” he says.
Globally, tech prodigies such as Ben Pasternak, who built his first viral app at 15, Samaira Mehta, who founded a coding game company before she was 11, and Kenya’s Mubarak Muyika, who found a web hosting company at 16 and sold it for six figures at 18, represent how early exposure can fast-track young people into the technology ecosystem.
Nwebedu’s trajectory fits into that global pattern; he is part of a generation of self-taught innovators who, despite limited infrastructure, are achieving world-class results.
However, in Africa, many young people face barriers that delay their entry into the technology sector. Limited Internet access, epileptic power supply, and a lack of affordable devices or structured mentorship programmes mean that many only begin serious coding or system design in university, long after their peers elsewhere have started.
That’s why organisations like Utiva, Moringa School, and AltSchool Africa have become vital. They are closing the early-exposure gap by teaching technology subjects like software engineering, data science, DevOps, and product design to teenagers and young adults, creating the kind of pipeline that once enabled Nwebedu’s growth.
Similar initiatives like Umurava and Andela connect young Africans to tech jobs.
Together, these initiatives are rewriting the story of what’s possible for young Africans in tech. But while they are helping close the early-exposure gap, they cannot solve the problem alone. Permanent solutions will require affordable devices, reliable Internet, and stable power supply to ensure that every young person has a fair chance to thrive in the digital age.
