I make software that
is easy to live with.
I'm Eddie Ezekiel Ochieng, a software developer in Kenya. I'm fairly calm to work with and a little obsessive about the details most people never see. I like understanding a problem properly before I touch a keyboard, and I like sticking around long enough to watch the thing actually get used.
It started with a spreadsheet, honestly.
I never had some grand passion for technology. What I did have was an itch to build systems that solved real problems. Early on that looked like tracking things in Excel and slowly making it do more than a spreadsheet has any business doing.
In 2016 I found a free MIT programming course online, worked through it, and that was that. I kept making small solutions, studied IT at Kabarak University, and over time the toy projects turned into work people pay for. These days I work mostly in Python and JavaScript, leaning on Next.js and TypeScript for full-stack builds.
Start a project with me2016
Stumbled into it
Found one of MIT’s free programming courses online and worked through it out of curiosity. I was not chasing a career in tech. I just liked the idea of building a system that made a messy problem tidy.
University
Studied IT at Kabarak
Put some structure under the self-teaching and kept building small tools on the side. A lot of them started life as an over-engineered spreadsheet.
Now
Building real products for real people
Working on web apps that people actually rely on, from an internet provider’s platform to an online dictionary for an NGO to a safety project of my own.
A few things I'd argue about.
How a thing feels to use matters as much as whether it works. A tool people enjoy is a tool people keep.
Plain beats clever. If I have to explain it twice, the design owes someone an apology.
I would rather ship something small that holds up than something big that wobbles.
I stay close after launch. That is usually when the interesting problems show up.
I'm a serious boxing fan. I don't fight, but I've done a bit of boxercise and light sparring, and I read, watch and argue about the sport endlessly. Old-school greats like Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Pernell Whitaker and Salvador Sanchez, and modern ones like Chocolatito, Crawford and Shakur Stevenson. What pulls me in is the resilience and the loneliness of it. Boxing is honest about cost in a way the tech world usually tries to hide.
The rest of my reading runs to Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Kant and Frantz Fanon, with the categorical imperative and utilitarianism the kind of thing I'll happily lose an evening to. St Augustine's Confessions is the one I keep coming back to when I need to slow down.
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Lately I've been just as taken with growing things. I get genuinely worked up about deforestation and the state of our water, so on a small scale I'm teaching myself permaculture, a bit of syntropic farming, and what you can actually do with pots on a balcony. It's a slow, stubborn kind of curiosity, which is probably why it feels a lot like programming.
Based in
Kenya
Happy to work remotely and across time zones.