Interview: Meet John, The 15-Year-Old Nigerian Sofware Engineer Everyone Is Talking About

Everyone has a hobby, most people have some sort of passion, and others, like John, have ambition. He was aged 14-years-old when he started “burrowing” his parent’s phones to see how they were made. He would study the compartments of the devices, taking it all in and making notes.

Eventually – he taught himself how to code, started making web applications, and created an NFT (non-fungible token) with node, typescript, and solidity. His skill-set gained him wide-spread attention from his friends, who started spreading the word on his services.

At first – he took on clients for free, but over time, dozens of people started paying him for his work, and at just aged 15-years-old – he helped his school create its website.

 He has now helped a series of startups in Akure, Nigeria with software development and cyber security for each software. He can boldly write python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, nodes, erlang, dart, and other related programming languages.

At the moment – he is currently working on flutter as a side Booster

So what advice would you give to other young people who want to be where you are?

So I will say that what they need to know is that even if you’re in school you don’t need to stop your school and put all your attention on coding. You need to be organized, make a schedule.

You also need to be committed because I used to work all night just to get things done and then I would show most of the friends but a lot of them didn’t believe that I had made it haha.

You need to be inquisitive – I had read something about NFTs and blockchain so I decided to teach myself about those industries and started reading a bunch of books about them.

Where do you hope to be in the next few years?

Yeah, people do ask me where I should be in the next five years. But I tell myself where do I want to be in the next year?

When I started I didn’t ask for money but I plan to rapidly grow my services and I believe by 2023 I would have started my own company because I’m working on a lot of crazy and innovative ideas right now. Like in my laptop, there are like seven projects nobody has done before – I always have these ideas just exploding in my brain.

How do your parents feel about

They’re really supportive. Like, they supported me when they started seeing other companies were supporting me, paying me and of course looking for my referral.

Encouraging his readers to trust in God and to believe in their purpose, he said; “First you need God to start a business and also need him to back up the business, what helped me was I put God first in all I do.

Remember when you tell yourself you have a goal, purpose and you are going somewhere, trust me your body will move according to the way you want it to go.”