Every year is full of ups and downs and my 2016 was full of extremes. From traveling to places I had never been to before to picking up some habits I wish I had developed earlier. One of such habits is reading books and that is exactly what this post is about. Before now I hardly read books and even when I do it’s mainly for some technical reference or something similar. I read more books this year than any other year.
Continue readingO’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2016
I was in New York on the 12th of April to deliver a talk at the O’Reilly software architecture conference on how my team and I built a report-casting mobile app for the 2015 Nigeria elections.On the surface, the talk was just about how we, as a team, built two mobile apps with a shared REST API running in the cloud. It was also about how we used an agile approach for the first time. In a real sense though, my talk was actually about how software development is inherently a social activity; the effect of corporate culture on software development (Conway’s law) and the pains associated with software development.
Continue readingHow we built an election report-casting app!
We had always wanted to build something relevant for elections in Nigeria and we had a lot of talk around this subject in 2011 when the last general elections in Nigeria were held but never did anything more than just talk about it. So when the 2015 elections were around the corner again, the talk came back but this time we were determined to get something done, anything!It all started with an excel sheet containing around 118,000 records, polling unit records from all across Nigeria. Since each polling unit record had a geographic coordinate, we were able to plot all the records on a map. Here is a map of Nigeria showing all the polling unit data (Google maps):
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