Software Engineer. AI Systems Researcher. Educator. Community Builder. These aren't separate identities - they're the same person trying to understand the world and make it work better.
I started in Mathematics - not software. My degree from the University of Nigeria was in pure Mathematics, which gave me something most engineers don't have: a natural instinct for abstraction, proof, and the underlying structure of problems before the syntax gets in the way.
I discovered engineering backwards. I learned to code because I needed to build something, not because I enrolled in a programme. That self-driven path meant I had to figure out a lot of things alone - which turned out to be the best preparation for working in AI, where most of the field is still being figured out in real time.
What pulled me into AI specifically was the gap I kept seeing between what research papers claimed and what actually worked in production. That gap became my obsession - and eventually my niche.
I am fundamentally interested in systems that work - not systems that demo well. The most interesting engineering problems are the ones where the gap between "it works in the notebook" and "it works for users at 2am" is widest.
That's why I care about evaluation. Not benchmarks, not leaderboards - actual evaluation of behaviour in conditions the engineer didn't predict. This is especially true in AI, where models can be confidently wrong in ways that are genuinely hard to catch without deliberate testing infrastructure.
The teaching side of my work comes from the same instinct. Africa has an enormous pool of intelligent people who have never been given a clear path into these fields. If I can be one point on that path for even a few of them, that's a compounding investment in what the continent builds next.