The Geek Circle The Voice of Africa’s Tech Community
As a boy, Anthony Atuoha wanted to be a lawyer. Then he sat in front of a computer for the first time, and that was the end of his law career. “I felt like I had a connection with it,” he says.
Today, Anthony is a Senior Mobile Software Engineer specialising in Flutter, a technical writer published on freeCodeCamp, an open source contributor, and a consistent voice in the African developer community.
The computer that changed everything
Anthony attended a Nigerian government primary school that had no computers. He was admitted into a private secondary school and started computer classes. He did not know what the exact course was back then, but he knew this was what he wanted to do: “I immediately said, I’m going to study this,” he recalls. He spoke to his teacher and found out about computer science.
He started immersing himself in programming languages, finding any material he could get his hands on at the time. When he got to university to study computer science, he started building projects.
He began with Java, building desktop applications, then pivoted to .NET. “What pushed me towards web development was actually survival in a way,” he says plainly. Around 2018 and 2019, he started writing backend code to earn money.
But once the survival mood eased, he started asking bigger questions about where the industry was heading. Android devices were everywhere. The answer was mobile. He made a full pivot into mobile development, eventually finding his home in Flutter. That bet has paid off. Today, he leads mobile engineering at EV1 Health, a London-based AI-powered fitness and wellness company, where he owns the mobile architecture and sets technical direction for the product. Before that, he scaled fintech mobile applications at Sujimoto Group, improving performance by 30% while supporting a 40% increase in transaction volume.
Learning the hard way, then learning the right way
School taught Anthony theory. But actually learning to program was something he had to figure out on his own, without a mentor with enough time to point him in the right direction.
What he ran into was a problem that does not get talked about enough. “It’s comprehension,” he says. “You can pick up Python today and spend three weeks learning it, and you are not even comprehending it.” He spent two years learning four different programming languages, grinding through courses and tutorials, only to realise later that he had never truly used any of them. “Those languages, I’ve never touched them for the past six years. They were literally irrelevant because I didn’t know what to study.”
The turning point came when he decided to stop consuming tutorials and start building. His test was simple: after finishing a course or a playlist, he would try to build something entirely different from what the tutorial covered. If he could do it without rewinding a single video, he had actually learned something. If he could not, he had only been following along. “That’s actually when you get the test of, did you actually understand what you spent six weeks learning?”
Teaching accelerated comprehension further. He started instructing at a bootcamp while still in school, covering mathematics. “You can’t teach what you don’t understand. People are going to ask you the kind of questions that will make you uncomfortable, the kind of questions that will truly test if you understand this.” Teaching in the boot camp pushed him to understand concepts thoroughly and cemented his confidence as an engineer.
Even now, he still builds projects just to test his understanding of new concepts. “So if you go on my LinkedIn or anywhere, you see me building projects, you see me building demo projects,” Anthonly explains. “Most of them are things I’ve learned. I want to test myself to see if I really, really understood it.” He is quick to flag the specific danger that AI has introduced into early-stage learning: a student can use a tool to complete every assignment, appear to be progressing, but genuinely not be comprehending a thing. His advice on learning a concept to new developers is: you have to try to build something new with it, something the tutorial never showed you. If it breaks, that is the lesson. If it works, you actually know it.
Not self-taught but community-taught
Anthony regularly contributes technical articles to platforms like FreeCodeCamp. He writes because he remembers exactly what it felt like to be lost while learning, and he writes for the person still in that place. “I know that there’s somebody out there who is probably in school, or probably in a different career, trying to pivot to tech,” he says. “They can go to YouTube, get started, and then get overwhelmed with everything that is there.” His technical articles are an attempt to be the structured, practical resource he did not have when he needed one most.
He uses analogy as his primary tool for making complex ideas land. When explaining multi-agent AI systems, for instance, he maps the architecture onto a company org chart: the agents are the staff, the orchestrator is the product manager running the standup, the context passed between agents is the PRD handed from one team to another. “When you explain it in a way that paints a picture,” he says, “they start understanding it not technically, then they start connecting the dots.” The technical layer comes after the mental model is in place.
Community makes it easier
Anthony believes community makes the journey to becoming a successful developer easier. “It makes you know that you are not alone,” he says. “The problems you are facing are not unique to you.” He has seen this play out repeatedly, in the developers he has mentored and in his own story.
He points to events like Google I/O Extended and DevFest as doing exactly this kind of work in the African developer ecosystem. They are spaces where a developer who has been grinding in isolation gets to look around and see that the field is full of people just like them. “That’s why community is very important to what I do,” he says, “because that was actually what helped me so much.”
The community he describes is also a practical accelerator. He knows developers who came from fields with no technical overlap, who found their footing in tech precisely because a community gave them a starting point and a support structure. A friend of his pivoted from architecture into tech. He now works at one of the top technology companies in Nigeria. The community was part of how he got there.
Build for Lagos. Build for the world.
Recently, comments by the CEO of Moniepoint have sparked debates about the state of local engineering talent. The concern is familiar: developers who look good on paper but struggle to deliver in production environments. Anthony does not dismiss the critique. He thinks it points to something real, and he thinks the solution starts with how developers here are taught to think about what they are building and who they are building it for.
He points out that the constraints in Nigeria and Africa in general give developers a competitive advantage. As a mobile engineer building for Nigerian users, he learned early that you cannot assume a stable network or the latest operating system. “We build for low devices,” he says. “That equips us to go the extra mile.” The engineer who has been building for less-than-ideal conditions has to get more creative than one who is not. Nigerian developers who have spent years solving problems that their counterparts in London or Toronto never encounter arrive at international roles with resilience. “They were doing amazing with no infrastructure from where they are,” he says. “And now they are at that place where they can strive more.”
But resilience alone is not the goal. The larger shift he wants to see, in the ecosystem broadly, is a change in ambition. African developers need to stop building as if the ceiling is Lagos and start building as if the floor is the world. His current role has him building a product that supports automatic translation across 27 languages, detecting a user’s location and switching the interface accordingly. “We should start building with the mindset of, what if this is used like Duolingo, used by everybody in the whole wide world?” he says. “50 million people using it at the same time. That is actually the gap.” Build as if the startup will be acquired. Build as if the user base will multiply by a hundred. “When you have the mindset that it will scale,” he says, “it helps you write systems that can scale.”
Leaving a legacy for developers coming behind
Anthony’s ultimate goal is to provide articles, open-source projects, and mentorship that gives the next developer a picture of what production actually looks like before they get there. His writing, his code on GitHub, the consultations and the community work, all of it is an attempt to be the sample that someone, somewhere, has never had access to before. “If somebody doesn’t know how to sew a “senator” and has never seen one,” he says, “they will sew it in the way they’ve seen it is meant to be sewn.”
