I build thingsahead of their moment.Nearly two decades on,I still write the code.

My grandfather, Odigie Iyamu, was a village chief. He hunted. My grandmother took what he brought back to market, and between them they paid for my father's schooling. He got up at four in the morning to tap rubber before walking to class. He became an engineer at Shell. That is how a Nigerian family ended up in Aberdeen, and how there came to be a DOS machine in the house when I was four. Now, in my spare time, I'm building free, solar-powered learning centres from shipping containers and dropping them in villages across Africa. The first one is going up in my own village in Nigeria.

I have been building ahead of the moment ever since. Federated computing nobody would fund. One neural net split across a drone, a hub and the cloud, in 2015. Privacy engineered into a drone before the regulation existed. The habit never turned into a job title. I last wrote production code today, across three of the things on this page.