Sir Ovie 👑

Software developer. I build production applications — the kind people log into, pay through, and depend on. Lagos. Founder, Oak Forge Academy. DMs open.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

I build production software.

The kind people log into, pay through, and depend on.

So far: a learning platform, a creator commerce product, and an admissions system that handles real money.

Whatever the stack, whatever the market. if it has to actually work, my DMs are open.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Apple TV just launched in Nigeria, bundled into iCloud+ for ₦1,300/month.

No Nigerian films. No local series. No commissioning slate — just two Mo Abudu projects confirmed so far.

Netflix has funded over $23M in Nigerian productions since 2016, and picked up viewers after Showmax shut down in April.

Cheap access isn't the same as being invested in a market.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Bamboo and Cowrywise went down the morning the Dangote IPO opened.

Not from an attack. From ordinary demand they should have expected.

Consumer fintech spends its budget on the sign-up flow, not on the day everyone shows up at once.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Anthropic and OpenAI are now publicly debating whether to slow AI down.

Meanwhile most "AI" running in Lagos businesses is one webhook retry away from double-charging a customer.

The frontier's problem is speed. Ours is still correctness.

Which one is actually costing your business money right now?

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Sometimes, I think about the pain some of our parents carried. Silently killing their big dreams, settling for an average life, and never daring to dream that big again.

God, please, I don’t want that kind of pain.

I don’t want to spend my life wondering what could have been.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

@Tobielobba Dear all, I just need your REPOST!

I run a tech academy. We are having our Python Development Cohort September 15th and Data Analytics and Data Science Cohort October 5th. Please help me Repost.

https://t.co/iRCBHM5OVa

Someone might be interested on your TL.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Most Nigerian tech training gives you a certificate.

Nobody hires a certificate.

We put you in a small cohort with a live instructor and you leave having built something that runs.

Next Python cohort starts September 15th. ₦50,000.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Why learn Python when AI writes code?

Because AI can write the code and still be completely wrong, and someone has to be able to tell.

That someone gets paid. That someone is who we’re training.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Nobody tells you that the years you think you wasted are the ones that make you different from everyone else later.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Your database has the new price. Your cache still has the old one.

The user sees the wrong number, and nothing in your logs says "error" — because nothing broke. It just served something that used to be true.

Set a TTL you actually trust, or invalidate on write. Pick one on purpose.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Honest question for people building for Nigerian institutions.

When a regulator asks a school or a clinic to prove how they handle personal data, what should that proof even look like in practice?

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Personal data is not a feature. It’s a liability you agreed to hold.

Every extra field you collect is one more thing you have to protect, justify and eventually delete.

Collect less. It’s cheaper and it’s safer.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Every conversation about AI in Africa is about models.

Almost none of it is about the fact that most of the continent’s institutional data isn’t digitised,
isn’t structured, and isn’t ours to train on.

We’re arguing about the engine while the road is still sand.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Authentication answers: who are you.

Authorization answers: what are you allowed to do.

Mixing them up is how a logged-in user ends up seeing someone else's data. Two different problems. Solve them separately.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

African startups raised $2.1B in the first 8 months of 2026.

Nigeria led the pack — $528M.

Almost all of it sat in a handful of mega-deals. Everyone else is stitching together sub-$150k grants.

If you're building pre-seed right now, are you even chasing VC anymore — or just building on grants and revenue?

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Africa has 9 unicorns since 2015.

Zero tech billionaires.

Flutterwave's worth $3B on paper, Moniepoint moves $250B a year — still nobody's cashed out. No IPOs, just dilution round after round.

A valuation isn't wealth until there's an exit.

It's part of why I'd rather grow on grants and revenue than a cap table I can't escape.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

GONA tried to digitize danfo fares in 2019.

QR codes, an app, VC money behind it.

Died by 2020 — not from bad tech, from union bosses taxing every terminal it touched.

Lagos State just signed its own danfo digitization deal.

Difference: they signed the MOU with the unions first.

The tech was never the hard part.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

A Kenyan fintech's founders were arrested this week over allegations they diverted KES 31.2m in retailer money they were only meant to hold and forward.

Any platform sitting between a customer's payment and a merchant's payout is one bad month away from being someone's personal float.

It's avoidable. Split the money at the point of sale instead of settling it "later."

Would you trust a platform that holds your money before forwarding it, or one that splits it automatically?

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Built a tuition system for a school client where families can pay in four installments or all at once.

Balance is calculated cumulatively, so however the payments land, the numbers still net out to the exact right total.

No spreadsheet reconciliation at month end. No "did they actually pay?" emails.

If your business collects money in pieces — fees, memberships, installment sales — this is the kind of system that saves someone's sanity every month.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

MTN just said it's going deeper into banking.

OPay and PalmPay should be worried. Moniepoint less so.

A telco can out-market a wallet app overnight. It cannot out-service a merchant network overnight.

[Sir Ovie 👑 @ake_oj]

Some mornings I open my laptop before I've fully decided to be awake.

Not because I have it figured out. Because stopping costs more than showing up half-formed.

Still learning to tell the difference between discipline and just being scared to stop.