Kelvin Omereshone unconventional advice on forging your own path in tech

From a young age, Kelvin Omereshone’s interests marked him as a maverick. Unlike other children in Delta State, Nigeria, who listened to popular songs, he gravitated toward classical music. This distinct interest hinted at a mind that would chart its own path. 

At 10, his curiosity led him to search his father’s briefcase. Inside was a notebook filled with code written in BASIC. His discovery changed the trajectory of his life. “I fell in love with reading the code.” From then on, he knew he wanted to learn how to tell computers to do stuff. 

But when he started leafing through university brochures, software engineering was nowhere to be found. Everyone around him wanted to get into well-established career paths. “Everybody told me that software engineering is not really a viable career path because everybody was doing civil engineering or wanted to be a doctor,” he says. “I was the only person who wanted to study software engineering at that age.” Not seeing a clear way forward, he decided to teach himself to code. 

Forging his own path has led him to become the CEO of The Sailscasts Company, build Hagfish, publish The African Engineer, and he created the Boring Javascript stack, started the African Indie Hacking movement in Nigerian cities! But the journey to where he is today is unlike anything you’ve ever heard. 

Hearing the call

Kelvin began the arduous process of teaching himself how to code. He would spend hours at cyber cafes, poring through W3 school documentation and teaching himself Bash script and Python. He discovered The New Boston on YouTube, a popular tutorial channel back then, and learned HTML and CSS.

Despite his progress, the decision of what to study was still looming over his head. “I decided to become a mechanical engineer because I was really good at math.” Then, during a church service, something unexpected happened. He heard the words “computer science”. It became his sign. He took the post-UTME exam for Delta State Polytechnic, passed with flying colors, and enrolled to study computer science.

Burning the midnight oil 

But he soon discovered that the school’s curriculum was outdated. While other students left class and went about their day, Kelvin headed to the library. He read ancient C++ books, Visual Basic manuals, and Java documentation.  It was here that he honed a skill he had started in childhood—reading code like prose. Soon, he became the person people came to with all their coding problems. Not only that, he was at the top of his class. 

But as graduation approached, his non-conformist nature resurfaced. He decided to leave the program. “I’ve come to school and learnt enough. I augmented that immensely by learning on my own. I had what I needed, so I abandoned the certificates and went to get my first tech job.”

He didn’t have a laptop, so he used his friend’s computer.  He sharpened his skills by taking courses from Linda (now known as LinkedIn Learning) and FreeCodeCamp. “I was just learning and learning and learning and learning with no prospects.” But all his hard work was about to pay off. Word had gotten around about Kelvin as the guy who was really good with code. 

One day, the phone rang. A founder who’d just started a startup needed a front-end developer and offered him the job.

“It was a learning curve because it was my first full-time job,” he recalls. “That was the first time I had to download something from GitHub. I didn’t know what a repo was, or SPA, or Vue.” It was where he learned that solving hard problems that interest you opens unexpected doors.

When a door shuts, another one opens

Getting into Andela was the holy grail for Nigerian developers back then. Kelvin tried and failed three times. At the time, it felt crushing, but now he sees it as providence. “I would not trade going to Andela for what I am doing right now.”

As Kelvin grew in his career, he noticed a problem that kept gnawing at him: JavaScript development was too fragmented. No one seemed interested in unifying it, so he decided to tackle it himself. He created an adapter for Inertia.js (a technology from the Laravel ecosystem) that would work with JavaScript. To do this, he had to read Laravel adapter code, Rails adapter code, and adapters in multiple languages he didn’t normally use just to understand the pattern.

“It worked, and people used it. Two brothers in the UK told me they used it to run their water delivery service. It was one of my proudest moments.”

As lead maintainer of Sails.js—a framework that helps developers build web applications faster by providing pre-built components and structure—Kelvin is now responsible for a key piece of JavaScript infrastructure used globally. He created Sailscasts.com as a platform to teach this approach, positioning himself as the go-to expert for full-stack JavaScript development.

Raising problem solvers 

But Kelvin saw an even bigger problem. In Africa, everyone was training to get a job at a big company. Where were the builders? Where were the people creating their own opportunities?

In keeping with his pattern of seeing a problem, building the solution, he started the African Indie Hackers movement, organizing physical meetups in Lagos, Accra, Abuja, and Port Harcourt. The message was simple but radical: you don’t need to be a unicorn to succeed.

“If you build something that makes $2,000/month from real customers, you’re doing better than most full-time tech employees in Africa,” he argues.

There are two reasons behind his logic:

First, striking out on your own gives you more control over your career. “A job is an opportunity someone else gives you, and the opportunity will always go when they want it to.”

Second, you could make significantly more than if you worked for a company when you’re solving real problems.

But Kelvin also wants developers to be wary of chasing money instead of competence.

“One stroke of luck and you could get the job in six months, making big money. But like every other field that pays money, it takes time to be good at it,” he cautions. “Would you want a surgeon who spent six months on YouTube to do surgery on you?”

He wants more developers to take their time to become experts, especially because what they build is critical to the businesses that use them. “Learn to be the best at what you do. Money will always come when value is given,” he says. 

Prioritizing engineering over fundraising

Let’s be honest: this path is hard. And it doesn’t help that most stories from the African tech space are fundraising announcements and influencer features. It’s almost as if expertise doesn’t matter as much as capital raised.

That’s why Kelvin recently launched The African Engineer, a publication dedicated entirely to telling African engineering stories.

“Stories about X, Y, Z raising $200 million don’t empower anyone,” he says. “It could be greater if we focus on what the engineers are like. Asking them to share what they have been building and how they solve problems. There’s a lot that is like a black box in our ecosystem.”

The publication shares the behind-the-scenes technical details of building in Africa, like what languages companies use and how they navigate constraints. His first issue, featuring the core banking system of Kuda (a leading Nigerian fintech), was a massive hit. In one day, he gained 255 subscribers from a single tweet. The ecosystem was hungry for this content.

“We celebrate fundraising as if it’s not debt incurred because you’re owing your investors,” Kelvin notes. “What about the engineering that these people have done? Because in Africa there are a lot of constraints. How do they maneuver all this to give something that is amazing? No one is talking about that.”

He also created SailsConf Africa—a conference explicitly designed for intermediate and senior developers, not beginners. “Most conferences are too soft, too beginner-focused. We need to grow up,” he says. The goal is industry-standard technical talks, like React Conf, where real technology gets launched from the stage. He plans to run it again in 2026.

Kiddies, it’s time to grow up

Kelvin wants the African tech ecosystem to grow up, and fast. As it stands, a spat between a founder and their employees is likely to draw more attention than a technical conversation.

“I was on a technical space on X. I was literally the only African on the speaker section,” he recounts. “That’s not because I’m special. It’s because we’re not showing up to the right conversations.”

To move from this “kiddie stage,” as he calls it, requires a fundamental shift in what the ecosystem values. “We need to stop thinking about what the tech ecosystem will do for us and start thinking about what we will do for the tech ecosystem,” he says.

His prescription is clear: more technical talks, more documentation of how problems are actually solved, less celebration of fundraising, and less spotlight on influencers. 

“Africa doesn’t need more talent,” he argues. “Talents go to the highest bidder. We need builders. Builders stay to solve problems they care about.”

It’s a controversial stance, but it’s working. Someone attended his Lagos indie hacker meetup, built their first SaaS, and sold it to someone in the US. Now they’re on their second project.

We’ll close with Kelvin’s wish for any dev reading this: “I want people to hear my story, study the work I do, and quit their tech job and build the next company that will make them $1 million per year.”