Mr Osile 👨🏽‍💻

It's been a while now but I officially got an Android Developer internship role. 🎉🎉🎉🎉 #AndroidDev

In the industry you exist in, there is a Champions league. Strive to play there. End.

I remember a junior engineer I worked with who genuinely thought he was a bad software engineer. Not average. But Actually bad. Why? Because every ticket took him too long. He could not debug production issues fast. He got confused in code reviews. And whenever senior engineers spoke about caching, queues, indexing, retries, race conditions, he would just go silent. So naturally he made the worst conclusion possible: "Maybe I am just not smart enough for backend work." But that was not the real problem. The real problem was much simpler. He was missing a few boring prerequisite skills that nobody had properly taught him: 1. How HTTP actually works 2. How databases really read and write data 3. How logs are used to trace a bug 4. How to read an unfamiliar codebase without panicking 5. How to break a big problem into smaller checks 6. How async code fails in real systems That is it. Not talent or IQ. Just missing foundations. So instead of telling him to "work harder" or "be more confident", we fixed the inputs. For a few months he did very basic things: - wrote simple SQL queries by hand - debugged small bugs slowly and documented the path - learned API flow end to end - traced requests from load balancer to service to database - read old incident reports - picked one concept every week and went deep on it Nothing fancy. No 10x engineer nonsense. No fake motivation. Simply repetition on the right prerequisites. And things changed! The same guy who used to freeze during debugging started finding issues before others. The same guy who thought he was "bad at coding" started writing cleaner code reviews. He used to get stuck on every production issue and now became the person people tagged for backend bugs. A year later, new joiners thought he was naturally talented. He was not. He was finally practiced. This is something a lot of people in software do not understand: A weak foundation feels like low intelligence. A strong foundation feels like talent. Many people are failing because they are trying to do senior-level work without junior-level repetitions. And the opposite is also true. Some people think they are geniuses when really they just got early exposure: better college better peers better internship better manager better starting point That lead disappears very fast if they stop practicing. Software engineering is like that. Prerequisite knowledge is intellectual capital. It can take a person from: "Maybe I am not cut out for this" to "I can probably build this" And it can also take someone from: "I am the smartest guy here" to "why is everyone catching up to me so fast?" Do not judge yourself too early. Sometimes you do not need more confidence. You need more reps on the fundamentals.

The best software engineers I know all have this in common: • Start coding with big dreams at 21. • Get rejected by companies at 22. • Take the job they could get at 23. • Spend 2 years fixing bugs and writing CRUD APIs. • Feel behind when others post big salaries online. • Try to switch at 26. • Fail interviews at 27. • Realize tutorials were not enough. • Finally learn CS fundamentals, system design, databases, networking, and how real systems break. • Start building better at 29. • Become dangerous at 31. And change their family’s future by 35. With their sharpest years still ahead. Software engineering is not a sprint. It is a long game of skill, patience, and staying in the fight. Keep going.

In 2019 a startup in Yaba launched their app on a Monday morning by Tuesday they had 300,000 users by Wednesday their server had crashed 4 times by Thursday their investors were asking questions nobody wanted to answer the engineer on call hadn’t slept in 48 hours all of it could have been avoided with one thing Bookmark this. RT so your timeline sees it too

Playing the long game in a software career feels slow at first, but it compounds harder than most people expect. 1. Early years feel repetitive: fixing bugs, reading docs, learning fundamentals. Nothing looks “impressive” yet. 2. Then patterns start repeating. You solve problems faster because you’ve seen variants before. 3. Your decisions get better. You design things once instead of rewriting them three times. 4. Leverage appears: mentoring, owning systems, influencing architecture instead of just tickets. 5. Suddenly the same effort produces 10× impact. That’s when “steady progress” turns into “how did this happen so fast?” Most people quit during the boring phase. The ones who don’t get paid by the curve, not the clock.

This is especially true in software development industry. You can’t undo a slow start, a bad first job, or a few years spent in a sloppy codebase with no mentorship. You can’t rewind the time you didn’t learn data structures, didn’t read design docs, or didn’t push yourself technically. That part is gone. But software has a unique property: future performance can completely dominate past mistakes if you get serious. I’ve seen people “waste” their first 3–5 years in service-based orgs, doing ticket work, copy-pasting code, and barely understanding the systems they touched. On paper, that looks like a dead end. In reality, some of those same people later locked in, taught themselves fundamentals, built real systems, took risks and today they’re running startups, leading teams, or operating at a level that would surprise anyone who knew their early career. What changed wasn’t luck. It was focus. They stopped obsessing over how far behind they were and started obsessing over what they could do this week. Reading one good engineering blog a day. Fixing one real bug properly instead of hacking around it. Rewriting something they didn’t understand until they did. Building side projects that forced them to learn databases, concurrency, deployment, failure modes. Slowly, consistently, without drama. Dwelling on the past is expensive in this field. It steals the only thing that actually matters: your ability to compound skill. Software rewards people who can build momentum late more than it rewards people who started early but coasted. You don’t need to be perfect. You need to be relentless and forward-looking. The present is where leverage lives. The future is where the payoff shows up. The past is just a lesson - use it, then drop it.

We're hiring Android engineers at @xAI to build for @X and @Grok. Looking for driven builders, to join our lean fast moving team! Apply / Share / my DMs are open! x.com/i/jobs/1967748…

If you are Android engineer with more than 10 years of experience: 1. We will pay you an extraordinary amount of money 2. You will have more fun here than any role in your life What are you waiting for?

When Kobe Bryant said his insane level of confidence came from knowing he’d done all he could to prepare, it taught me that anytime I’m nervous it means I didn’t prepare enough.

My software dev pet peeve is incorrectly named components. I know naming is difficult, but it's important to put more than one second of thought into it. When a name means something completely different from what the component is, it becomes painful to understand very quickly.

Facts. Particularly when it comes to career. Don’t give up. More importantly don’t stay still, all you’re doing is getting more experience in a field you don’t care about. If you’re actually stuck, in a dead end job. Do this today:

29 years I debated whether I could afford to spend $50K to buy the domain name I really wanted for Netflix (replay.com). I decided that was crazy money. Netflix it was. Now they can afford to pay 70 Billion for something. Who woulda thunk.

one of the things that differentiates a senior from mid-level is the ability to read and understand the docs. if you have the ability to sit down and take your time to read the documentation of a library or tool - you'll be better than most people at using that tool/library.

Dear young Nigerian, Now is the time to focus and pay attention to what really matters by prioritizing your personal development. Pay the price forward by ensuring you are fit and ready to offer your skills as a way to create value. Ensure you sharpen your skills daily. Flourish

A new Kotlin Multiplatform documentation on the Android developer site developer.android.com/kotlin/multipl…

🤣🤣

Wait! 👀