Dayo.

Software engineer @mastra | chronically offline

[Dayo. @dayodeniyi]

@andrewqu What if DoorDash was Siri

"Hey siri I'd like some croissants"

[Donyé @donye_goodness]

God has done it again✅

500 Level MBBS Result = 3 out of 3 Distinctions

Distinction (D) in Community Health & Primary Care
Distinction (D) in Obs & Gynae
Distinction (D) in Paediatrics

100L-500L Result = 5.00CGPA, 11 out of 11 Distinctions.
Mbbs, Unilag.

[Tunde Onakoya @Tunde_OD]

Part 2:

The children at this stage are the ones we now see in Traffic, begging for money, washing car windows, doing menial Jobs, picking plastic and metal scraps, working as Bus conductors etc.
After hustling all day, they make small change and go back to sleeping in uncompleted buildings, under bridge and in the dark corners.

I cannot even begin to explain to you the horrible things that happen to these kids at night in these places. We’ve had many cases where the older Area boys violently rape the kids, in some cases even kill them for money ritual(for clients). They Use the kids for cheap labor and have them bring back a fixed amount of money everyday. Etc

The streets doesn’t care for the fragility and innocence of a child. To survive, they must completely shed that innocence and become hardened—much harder than the harsh realities of their existence. This is when they take to Hard drugs, crimes and cultism. This is the only way to numb the pain and survive another day.

The cycle of becoming an Area boy is now complete.

Our solution(Like you have seen in this video) then becomes using brute force to eliminate such a deep rooted problem. The polite task force in their bid to “restore order and public safety” have only made the situation worse.

99% of those kids and the older Area boys have been arrested multiple times and have been to many prisons and correctional homes. This only hardens them even further and creates more disdain in their hearts for the law and society.

This is a hard problem, so what then can we do?

There are a few solutions worth considering but it will take time, commitment and partnerships between NGOs, private and public sector.
Everyone has a role to play…
I’ll try to outline them here as best as I can…

1. The first thing we have to solve for is shelter. The kids will not return home immediately and if you force them or try to reconnect them to their families, they will end up right back on the streets. It’s tough but the damage has already been done at the family unit. So we need a gap year for proper rehabilitation.
The government has a few correctional homes built for this reason, but they’re all in deplorable state. Poor management and even cases where the caretakers steal and sell weed to the same children they should be rehabilitating.
I think these centres should be privatized and directly funded by the banks as their major CSR project. This is more sustainable and provides direct funding. We need to build more shelter homes to house these children and take care of them.
This is the very reason why the chess in slums project cannot scale right now, we have taken a couple hundreds off the streets, I have personally adopted about 6 of them who now live with me and my parents. The kids need 6months-1 year of proper care and love before they can be re-integrated into society or connected back to their families.

2. Education and skill training. A lot of the kids cannot go back to conventional school anymore, so we have to try for vocational training.
Furniture making, Textile, Automotive industry, Farming, barbing etc. We need partners in these industries to help us upskill the boys. We’ve had a lot of success with fashion tailoring and furniture making in the past. some of the kids we put through that program can now do proper 3D modeling, design and make household furniture for sale.

3. More dedicated mentorship programs at Public secondary schools. This is the most important way to stop. the bleeding.

I’ll stop here as this has gotten too long and it’s impossible to fully capture my thoughts in one thread.
But please, let us fight for these kids and not just dismiss their plights out of anger. We are only different from them because we won the birth lottery. The child is the victim here.

That video breaks my heart because I believe those children hold the future of our country in their eyes and we must never let the cruelty of poverty rob them of becoming miracles.

[Tunde Onakoya @Tunde_OD]

They are still kids. what you’re doing is inhumane and an absolute waste of everyone’s time, because you know very well that it doesn’t how many times you arrest or harass these children, they’ll be back on the streets in a few days.

This is a very complex and multi-layered problem that requires careful thinking, real empathy and deep concerted effort if we’re going to even stand a chance.

Of course I understand why there’s a lot of anger and complaint about these children and the many vices they have committed. but it’s the only way they can get our attention—A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

This will become an even bigger crisis with time and it’s happening insidiously. it’s the very genesis of why we have such proliferation of Area boys and thugs In every corner of the streets of Lagos. We forget that no one becomes an area boy as an adult, it’s the children neglected overtime that grow up to become the thugs and area boys we complain bitterly about.

I have given the last 8 years of my life to working with these children and I have learnt many painful lessons in this time that continue to keep me up at night.

There are thousands of homeless/street kids wandering the streets of Lagos. If you drive regularly along Lekki -Epe expressway, you must have encountered them several times. They come up to your cars, beg for money, wash your windows, sometimes they become violent and break your side mirrors. Then they go back to their crevices to sleep, then resume hustling the next day. For you it’s a simple commute, for them, it’s the only life they’ll ever know.

Before we can understand how we got to this point and what we can do differently, we need to go back in time.

There are 3 major reasons why this problem has festered:

The first reason is 70% of these kids are not from Lagos, they are mostly from the neighboring states (Ogun, Ibadan, Kwara etc) and in some cases, from Northern and eastern Nigeria. In trying to escape extreme poverty, they are falsely promised that Lagos is the land flowing with milk and honey. So the ones that are brave enough to seek greener pasture become rebellious, abandon their families and travel with friends to Lagos with high hopes of succeeding and someday return home with great wealth. For many of them, there’s no going back if this doesn’t happen. It’s the same reason many Africans try to cross the Sahara desert into Europe.

The second reason is a failure of the public education system (primary/secondary schools). Most of the kids drop out of school because they struggle academically and are dismissed as Olodos (good for nothing) by their overworked and underpaid teachers. Infact, the public secondary system is the biggest contributor to this problem.

The third and most Important reason is the failure of the family unit(Broken homes). 80 percent of the children child you see neglected and abandoned on the streets is a direct result of broken homes. (This is actual data by the way) Maybe stop one day have a conversation with any of them, and you’ll quickly realize that the stories are very similar. It’s a failure of the family system, underpinned by poverty.
Some of them are orphans, some with single parents, some abused sexually even by their own fathers. The stories are deeply painful.

Through the culmination of these three things, the kids end up on the streets of Lagos. For them it’s an escape from hell and there’s no going back home. Death is a kinder fate.

With time, it becomes clear that the promise of a better life in Lagos was a facade and the beginning of an even greater struggle. But this time without a roof over their heads…

The streets become their new home and a life of violent survival begins. There are a couple of hotspots where they begin to converge—Oshodi Underbridge, Jakande, Marwa Bustop, Osale Eko dumpsite, Mushin, Ajah roundabout, Agege, Surulere Underbridge etc.

[Ghost St Badmus @commando_skiipz]

Early this year, I came across an Application Security role at an international company on LinkedIn. When I opened the job description, I saw that over 400 people had already applied, but I decided to take a chance anyway.

I made it through the first and second interview rounds. When I got to the third round (the second technical round), I was given several technical tasks to complete within a week.

Two out of the four tasks were secure code review challenges. I was only required to identify vulnerabilities, list them, and provide recommendations. But I knew I wasn’t the only strong candidate, and let’s be honest, being Nigerian, the odds weren’t exactly in my favour. So I knew I had to do something extraordinary.

Instead of doing it the traditional way, I built actual APIs using the vulnerable code they provided. Then I manually exploited each vulnerability exactly the way a real attacker would.

After that, I documented everything and wrote a near-perfect pentest report, screenshots, reproduction steps, impact, and recommendations included.

Then I took it a step further:
I rewrote the vulnerable code securely based on my own recommendations, rebuilt the APIs, and attempted to exploit them again using the same attack paths. Every attack failed, and I documented all of this in the same report to show clear before-and-after proof of remediation.

The crazy part is that, I completed everything in under 24 hours, even though I was given 7 days. I submitted the report with an email that ended with:
“…I hope this early submission won’t incur any penalties.” 😂

I made it to the 4th round (the 3rd technical round), and you could literally see the excitement on the interviewer’s face trying to figure out “who the hell is this guy?” 🤣🤣

Long story short, I made it to the final round, and I eventually got the offer letter.

I’ll attach a redacted version of my report and the GitHub repo link in the comments (PDF format), along with the code I wrote.

I hope this inspires someone out there to always go the extra mile. Be extraordinary in whatever you do.

[Mastra @mastra]

our old livestream failed

so heres the new one: https://t.co/4LboHxF3LA

[Sam Bhagwat @calcsam]

ts ai conf launch #2

we keep getting asked about patterns for using @aisdk ui, @assistantui, and @CopilotKit with mastra

so we built UI Dojo, a repo + frontend with mastra agents implemented in each of these

we are committed to first-class support for all of them

[Sam Bhagwat @calcsam]

ts ai conf launch #3

we believe developers deserve beautiful tools.

today we are excited to announce a new logo and brand for Mastra

we wanted something that would represent the dynamism and fluidity of agents

[Sam Bhagwat @calcsam]

ts ai conf launch #4

you may have read my book: Principles of Building AI Agents

well, we wrote a sequel: Patterns for Building AI Agents

about bridging the gap where AI teams stumble

between prototype and production

if you like and share this post we will send you a copy

[Matt Pocock @mattpocockuk]

If you're building AI stuff in TypeScript, you probably need to consider Mastra.

I've been very impressed with what I've seen so far.

[Alex Booker @bookercodes]

Anthropic's Skills are cool but I’m honestly more impressed by the their built-in code execution tool 👀

You can run arbitrary Python in a sandbox, write to disk, and use their file API to download it

Here's an example @mastra agent that happens to use the new pdf skill

[Abhi Aiyer @abhiaiyer]

I'm really vibing with how we display primitives in the playground when the agent becomes a Network.

[Mastra @mastra]

Build agents that never forget with Mastra https://t.co/GMqWVOeyl2

[Gustaf Alströmer @gustaf]

In less than 9 months @mastra have become the default TypeScript agent framework. They are the third-fastest-growing JavaScript framework ever.

[Jason Freedman @jasonfreedman]

Mastra was our first investment in this @orangecollectv fund. And man, did we pick right.

First investment = top candidate for a fund returner.

First check was the day before they started YC. We gave them the max they would take.

Second check? The very next day.

Why do we like this team so much? Because we love building with them and you really get to know a team when you're building your own software, using their tools, right alongside them.

[Bob Remeika @bob_remeika]

Congratulations guys! Way to go! Very proud to friends with the @mastra team.

If you are building an agent with typescript, check them out. It's a great framework.

[Kevin Xu @kevinxu]

@calcsam @mastra let's gooo!!!! mastra powers @alpha_ai !

[jp @jonathanprozzi]

Huge congrats to the @mastra team! Mastra has been an amazing framework and great to use

Super stoked to see this!

[Naomi Pilosof Ionita @npilosof]

Proud to be on your investor list — congrats @calcsam and the whole @mastra team!

[Andrew Altshuler @1eo]

ALL IN on these guys!

Every agent we build @CollectivelabHQ runs on @mastra

Best decision ever💎