When Joshua Nwankwo looks back at his childhood, he doesn’t recall a specific moment of inspiration that led him to software engineering. Instead, he remembers his mother’s phone. He was the kind of child who was always “looking for what’s not there,” driven by an innate curiosity to poke around and discover new features in every piece of hardware he could get his hands on.
That early inquisitiveness laid the foundation for a career that has transitioned from low-level programming in Nigeria to leading developer relations for global crypto agencies.
And Nwankwo’s work sits inside a larger truth about how modern technology spreads. The last decade has produced a flood of developer-first products, APIs, protocols, SDKs, and platforms that ship globally at speed. But adoption doesn’t fail because teams can’t build; it fails because most tools never get translated into something developers can learn quickly, trust deeply, and use confidently.
Documentation, onboarding, community support, and feedback loops are not extras. They are the infrastructure of adoption, and in web3, where complexity is high and the cost of mistakes can be brutal, that infrastructure is often the difference between a protocol that exists and one that gets used. Bridge-builders like Nwankwo operate in that gap: converting confusion into clarity and turning scattered interest into real ecosystems.
The technical foundation
Nwankwo’s formal introduction to the world of technology began at a Government Technical College in Enugu. Unlike a standard secondary school, the institution operated like a higher learning centre, divided into specialised departments. Nwankwo enrolled in Computer Craft Studies, where he quickly moved from the basics of Microsoft Office to early programming with Q-Basic and the Visual Studio environment.
“I knew I wanted to delve deeper into these subjects, so, after school, we’d pay someone to come to school to teach us basic web development. By the time we were graduating, we built a website for our school.”
Even at this early stage, Nwankwo demonstrated a level of self-reliance that would define his career. Rather than following the traditional Nigerian path of rushing immediately into university, he chose to take two gap years to refine his software engineering skills, a move he admits is rare among his peers.
During this time, he secured his first internship as a frontend software engineer at Genesys Tech Hub, where he immersed himself in the JavaScript ecosystem and mastered TypeScript, React, and Redux.
From research labs to the blockchain frontier
Following his internship, Nwankwo’s career took a turn toward emerging technologies. He joined a research and development startup, where he occasionally functioned as a machine learning engineer and at other times as a blockchain engineer.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
Stop struggling to find your tech career path
Discover in-demand tech skills and build a standout portfolio in this FREE 5-day email course
“We were trying out emerging technologies and attempting to figure out how we could use them to solve local problems.”
Long before the current global frenzy surrounding Artificial Intelligence, Nwankwo was building his own neural networks and experimenting with Internet of Things (IoT) projects, writing commands to control smart devices.
However, it was the discovery of blockchain technology that truly piqued his interest. He was drawn to the ideals of decentralisation and the ability to bypass censorship. Nwankwo quickly noticed a significant market gap, which led him to found Buildspace Africa, an early-stage developer, to support what he struggled to get while he was still learning. While the space was filled with back-end engineers focused on smart contracts, there was a glaring lack of frontend expertise to make these decentralised tools usable for the average person.
Nwankwo wasn’t just writing code anymore; he was building the infrastructure for a tech community, lowering the barrier to entry, making the developer journey less intimidating, and giving new builders a clearer path into a fast-moving industry.
Today, under his leadership, the organisation has trained and onboarded thousands of talents into web3 and partnered with various non-profit institutions on the same mission.
Becoming a developer relations engineer
As Nwankwo transitioned from being a Founding Frontend Engineer at Spheron Protocol, where he worked on decentralised hosting solutions, he realised he was increasingly split between core engineering and community engagement.
He discovered that he had a passion for teaching. This epiphany coincided with a pivot toward Developer Relations, a role that perfectly marries his technical skills with his desire to support other builders.
As a Developer Relations Engineer, Nwankwo views his role through a very specific lens. To him, DevRel is about two primary objectives: acquiring new developers and retaining existing ones. He acts as the vital intermediary between developers and the product owners.
“The developer relations engineer is an engineer. The engineer in the title serves the purpose because you need to really understand the people you are trying to solve the problem for, the language they speak, and the problem.”
His day-to-day work is far from just planning. It involves auditing developer journeys, writing technical guides, building software development kits, and hosting workshops. His background in core engineering gives him an edge in anticipating the challenges developers might face before they encounter them.
Nwankwo’s definition of DevRel serves as a necessary correction to a common industry misconception. While many view the role as purely tech evangelism or marketing with a minor technical side, his insistence on the engineer suffix reminds us that effective advocacy is impossible without the empathy earned through shared technical struggle.
Nwankwo’s journey has not been without its hurdles. One of the most significant lessons he learned early on was the importance of speed over perfectionism, a trait he had to strengthen while working in the fast-paced web3 industry.
He recalls spending two days professionally producing a developer campaign video in a studio, only to realise that the campaign timeline had shifted by the time he was done.
“I learned a very good lesson from that: when you work in the web3 industry, you don’t need it to be perfect at first. Put it out first and then make it better. So after that, I’ve been pretty much in check with timing.”
Building the bridge, then widening it
Joshua Nwankwo’s story is a reminder that the most valuable skill in technology is not just technical depth; it is the ability to spot a gap and have the courage to close it. While many people enter the industry chasing stability, Nwankwo entered it seeking answers, starting with his mother’s phone and eventually moving on to complex blockchain problems. He did not wait for permission or a seat at the table. He built his own through Buildspace Africa and the community work that followed.
That instinct matters even more when you zoom out. Blockchain adoption across Africa is reaching meaningful scale, but it is still constrained by fragile infrastructure. Estimates put crypto asset ownership on the continent at about 43.5 million people in 2024, a practical proxy for everyday blockchain usage in markets where wallets, stablecoins, and exchanges are the main entry points.
The biggest barriers are not ideological; they are operational: unreliable and expensive internet, limited access to trusted fiat on- and off-ramps, uneven user education, and constant security risks from phishing to wallet loss, all compounded by inconsistent regulation and weak consumer protection. Even where demand is strong, usage often bottlenecks at real-world integration. People want stablecoins for savings and cross-border payments, but merchant acceptance and seamless tooling still lag. This is the gap strong DevRel can close: translating complexity into clarity, building trust through documentation, and turning curiosity into confident, repeatable usage.
And Nwankwo’s curiosity does not stop at blockchain. Outside web3, he is still building for the same human problem: helping people connect with intention. He is currently building Letsdap, an event management tool with a social networking layer that goes beyond ticketing and scheduling.
The aim is to turn passive attendance into active participation by embedding an engagement layer directly into the event experience. At the centre of it is an AI-driven recommendation system that analyses a user’s profile and event goals to suggest the specific people they should meet, a natural extension of the work he has always done: making ecosystems feel navigable, and making opportunity easier to reach.
