I read biomedical engineering at the University of Ghana, and took a software engineering diploma alongside the end of it. The first taught me to be careful with things where being wrong has a cost. The second taught me to build.
I have been writing software professionally since 2023. Mostly booking systems, payment integrations, and the reporting a business actually makes decisions on.
I am usually building into something that already runs, for people who already have a way of doing the job. That means the first work isn’t code. It’s sitting with whoever does the job and finding out how it actually happens, rather than how anyone thinks it happens.
I get things wrong doing this, regularly. Someone tells me the screen I built adds a step to their day instead of removing one, and I change it. Being corrected by the person who does the work is the fastest way I know to build something they keep using.
When it’s built, I train the team on it myself. If nobody adopts it, it didn’t work, however good the code was.
I bake.
It turns out to be the same instinct as the work. In baking you weigh things, because guessing gets you something that looks right and isn’t. You follow the method exactly until you understand why it is the method, and only then do you know which parts you are allowed to change.
I would rather say I don’t know than put a number on a page I can’t defend.