Developer. Teacher. Speaker.
Thoughts, tutorials, guides, etc
Some people were outraged that The African Engineer charged ₦1,500 for its Lagos Life interview. It made $200 in two days. I’m building for the readers already willing to pay, and for everyone who joins them later. Good writing deserves a business model.
We keep treating ease as confirmation and difficulty as a warning. But neither feeling can tell us, by itself, whether a path is right.
We admire the extraordinary thing in a person, then complain that they are not also warm, charming, patient, available, and easy. But the parts we dislike may be tied more closely to the parts we admire than we want to admit.
I have been publishing more and writing less. AI gave me speed, but somewhere along the way I handed it the part I actually loved.
dominuskelvin.dev has expired, and my personal website now lives at omereshone.com.
Staging was supposed to reduce risk. In many teams it became risk inventory. The serious path is small changes, automated safety, production observability, and fewer fake gates.
When deadlines punish truth, engineers learn to protect the date instead of the product. Quality work needs room for trust, tradeoffs, and honest misses within reason.
The senior talent gap will not be fixed by hiring harder. African tech needs companies that manufacture talent, seniors who teach, and juniors who practice senior judgment before the title arrives.
AI really can replace some labor. But falling model costs, premium seats, metered agents, and uneven ROI mean the winners will be the firms obsessed with cost per useful outcome.
Too many Nollywood titles now feel like one more attempt to rearrange love, heart, wife, husband, or forever. An industry this large should not keep shrinking itself to cheating plots, marriage panic, and quick-cash emotional bait when it should be building worlds.
AI has made building easier. It has not made resonance automatic. Your minimum viable audience is the smallest group of people who share your worldview, want the change you are offering, and would miss your work if you stopped showing up.
State libraries became popular because teams duplicated reality between client and server. The better fix is to learn the memory hierarchy of a web app: UI state, URL state, session state, cache, and durable database truth.
JWT became the default answer for mobile auth, but mobile never invalidated session-based architecture. It just changed the transport and pushed too much responsibility into the client.
The Algorithm is a useful discipline for builders with more leverage than ever: question the requirement, remove what is unnecessary, simplify what remains, shorten the loop, and automate last.
JavaScript running on the server should have made us own more of our systems. Instead, managed databases trained builders to outsource data before they understood it.
Auth-as-a-service and JWT became defaults because SPA architecture made the browser client behave like a separate application. Most web apps do not need that theater.
Single-page applications did not just change rendering. They made frontend/backend separation, token auth, duplicated state, and managed everything feel normal. This is the genesis essay for a three-part series on how that happened.
Authentication gets treated as special-case engineering. For most full-stack apps, rolling your own auth means using proven primitives, secure cookies, server-side sessions, and skipping JWT overhead when a normal login form will do.
The advice to do what makes you happy is decent for a Saturday, but flimsy for a life. Much of what gives a life meaning asks for effort, sacrifice, and the courage to choose depth over comfort.
Free credits and usage-based pricing sell the feeling of affordability. What they often deliver is delayed pain, distorted validation, and the softest kind of lock-in.
Migration files promised reproducible schema evolution. In practice they often create drift, replay headaches, and fake safety. I prefer Sails auto-migrations in development and Slipway schema diff in production.
Before AI gave it a name, serious software was already being born from playful obsession, curiosity, and personal itch. AI just widened the doorway.
Git Flow worked for me as a solo maintainer because develop stayed hot and main stayed stable. But in an agentic world, the branch tax is no longer worth it. Git Vibe keeps the safety and drops the ceremony.
A new full-stack launch appears, JS influencers rave that it is the Rails or Laravel for JavaScript, and the ecosystem forgets Sails and Adonis already exist.
The smartest products usually win by joining the channels, habits, and systems users already trust. Only a few are good enough to make people change behavior entirely.
Most people try to be original too early. But mastery usually begins with imitation, apprenticeship, and the disciplined study of masters.
The PlanetScale CEO says not using managed services means you don't value your time. Werner Vogels says cost is a non-functional requirement. Pieter Levels runs a $3M business on less than $200/month in infra. I know who I'm listening to.
Base models hallucinate Yoruba, invent fake Pidgin, and confidently teach wrong word meanings. Here's how I'm fixing it: one training pipeline, four cloud API providers running in parallel, and a lot of stubbornness.
Distribution. Infrastructure. Design. Every African startup I review has the same three problems. Here is how I fix them.
You copied the Silicon Valley pricing model but forgot to check if your customers spend money the same way Americans do. They don't.
Mediocrity is easy to spot and reject. But 'good enough' is the silent killer of greatness - it checks almost every box, and that's exactly what makes it dangerous.
PayPal is finally returning to Nigeria with full receive access. The ecosystem is calling for a boycott. But before we play victim, let's have an honest conversation about why we were restricted in the first place.
Stop downplaying people's success because they 'know people'. Knowing people is a skill. Networks are built, not given.
Nobody tells you that being a founder means too many months at the end of the money. If you don't have faith in God, founding a company will teach you to find some.
Founders keep saying they need to do more marketing when what they actually need is to sell. Marketing builds awareness. Sales builds revenue.
Poverty can light a fire under you or burn your startup to the ground. The difference? Whether you need the money or want the money.
I left money on the table for five years because I ignored one simple truth about pricing.
In a world where AI makes everything easier, the only unfair advantage left is your ability to act. Intelligence is commoditized. Execution isn't.
You're killing your dreams by talking about them. Sharing your goals gives your brain a false sense of progress. Skip the announcements, focus on action and let your results speak.
It's a few days until a new year (again). Stop making new year's resolutions that fail by February. Here's what actually works: seizing the day, every single day.
AI-assisted coding, even in its crude form, is already more cost-effective than mediocre junior engineers. Here's the honest economic truth about AI replacing engineers in most tasks.
From contributor to lead maintainer, my open source journey, the lessons that shaped it, and how anyone can start.
Removing all the bells and whistles of “modern” web development complexities and pairing React with Inertia.js - the tiny routing library that makes The Boring Stack possible - truly makes React shine for me, and I love it.
By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to transform your monolithic applications into flexible, distributed micro-frontends without sacrificing the simplicity and reliability of The Boring JavaScript Stack.
The web was designed in a client-server architecture. Being a Client-Server Pragmatist is not a new concept; it simply means you are mature enough to distribute work in alignment with the original architecture of the web.
As a newbie to web development, you don't require a mentor.
For the next couple of months, I secretly doubted the decision I made to quit school. However, I decided to get some education while I wait for the job by taking a lot of tutorials
Platformatic provides a set of open source tools to improve the DX of building backend applications. In this article I document how I built a polls API with one of the Platformatic tools - Platformatic DB
Harminder Virk the creator of AdonisJS showed me this super easy way to test NPM packages locally.
After 65 days of being unemployed as a DevRel, I’m pleased and excited to let you all know that I’m now a JavaScript engineer and DevRel at Treblle
These tools make my life a little bit easier.
Whether you are a Harry Potter fan or not, we can all agree it is a masterpiece with over 500 million copies sold worldwide. Here are 6 lessons you can learn from the author about technical writing.
Astro components improve the DX of writing MPAs as we have been so used to doing in SPA frameworks like Vue, React or Svelte.
I'm not quick to try out a new technology but when my buddy James Q Quick mentioned he rewrote his website with Astro, I decided to try Astro for myself
guppy allows you to run JavaScript code all within the context of a Sails application.
In this article we zoom in at the problem osquery was created to solve and some of the use case osquery can be applied to.
Found these terms popping up more and more in my research into osquery. Thought it wise to document them.
osquery makes it simple to ask question about your machine using SQL, but how does osquery work?
osquery is an interesting tool that allows you query your operating system as if it was a big relational database.
Sailscasts.com finally have a completed course. Here are my learnings about the process.
2020 came in pack with a lot of giant steps, lessons learnt and overall massive decisions
Sailscasts is only the beginning
Future.wait let me satisfy a fearture request in a Flutter codebase I was working on. I show how I used it.
I have been looking at React these days and here is my thought.
Join the Sailscasts community and let's collaborate on your journey with Sails.js and Server-side JavaScript
Launch Sailscasts on March 17th, 2021 with a recurring revenue of 5,000 USD/month
The definitive source for Sails.js and modern backend JavaScript mastery.
These mistakes could be keeping you from reaching the next level in your software development career
In this article, I show a realistic way of testing APIs built using the Node.js MVC framework Sails
Postpone writing the code you don't need today.
Use tech that doesn't need you to sacrifice expressiveness for ease
My very first article on my personal blog