Building a Better Tomorrow
I have a special kind of love and respect for my home country of Nigeria. The people are incredibly hardworking, intelligent, and unstoppable, creating a strength that I have felt from a young age. It came in many directions: from my parents, friends, neighbors, and pastor, making a colorful sense of community. Here we are celebrated for both who we are together and who we are as individuals. I think this has given me the perspective of there being inherent value to every human life.
When I discovered coding and the algorithms related to predictions and machine learning, my desire to become a full-time software engineer was solidified. Making our thoughts come to life and seeing how we can shape the future of our world is what I find so incredible about the subject. I was so excited about this that I joined the software engineering community in Nigeria and ended up helping it grow to over 2,000 members. This represented an exciting time in my life because I was traveling, finding new colleagues across Africa, and meeting important people, such as engineers at Facebook.
What drives me is simple: providing value to people through a product or service, no matter what that may be.
Over time, my role in the software engineering community grew into a desire to help others. Whether I was sharing, teaching, or learning, I worked to bridge the gap between the public (people) and machines (technology). This led me to work on some pretty incredible projects across Africa, such as bettering distribution and accountability of electricity, improving the efficiency of an agriculture-based distribution chain, and creating sensors on farms to monitor water levels and soil nutrition. Today, I enjoy nothing more than utilizing the power of technology to improve others’ quality of life.
My desire to help other people somehow brought me to Norway and Snowball Digital. No matter what project I am put on, I can always see how my work provides some sort of value to someone else. I feel like this attitude, at least to some degree, exists in my fellow colleges as well. So I love coming to work and feeling this awesome synergy between us. The company is a great place to grow, develop, and succeed, besides a team of people who are always willing to offer a helping hand. In general, the New Normal Group highly values people, and so do I, which makes it such a good fit.
Don’t let the small things get to you. There is so much we can’t control, so it’s best to roll with the punches and appreciate life’s little moments of magic.
The funny thing about life is that we like to make these big plans for ourselves. Some end-destination where we think, “that is when I will have it all figured out.” While such plans give us direction, I believe that plans are meant to be changed. It’s why I try to stay humble and go with the flow. The most important thing for me is in the future when I am looking back on my life, I will be proud of the changes I helped create within my communities. I just want to know that I was able to make a difference.
