Week 9

Nigerian Election Updates

It's a new week and we are still on edge about the election that happened during the weekend. Results are yet to be finalized and we are all looking forward to what it would finally be. My wife and I have been checking our phones to follow up on the result but we don’t feel good emotionally after all the reports of rigging around the election. We felt the people in power had once again violated the will of the people to get their own way. The majority who voted felt this way and even more emotional because there is very little we can do about it.

I’ve known about elections in Nigeria for a while and it has always been about rigging. This time I thought it would be better because of the introduction of some technologies to make the election process more transparent. This certainly didn’t feel like the whole transparency was worth it after hearing a lot about the numerous report on the doctored result.

The winner was announced and it wasn’t the person majority of the youths were rooting for. Yet again, we feel betrayed, played, and used. Trust in the process they said, but the process is already faltered. They said the updated electoral act was meant to combat this but certainly doesn’t feel like the act was even in effect. There is a part of this where we feel consoled for the fact that the third-force party amassed a lot of votes which on its own is good news. We wanted our voice to be heard that we want a better country and it's finally looking like people are hearing and can see what is possible.

More German Classes

The second week of our German class has passed and now it feels like I’m making some progress. I now know how to count numbers in German as well as the alphabet. Although I’m still pretty confused about conjugations, I think this little progress felt good. Attending these classes also brought back the memory of being in school and having to do assignments. I’m starting to adjust to making sure I do my assignments ahead of the next class. A lot would be done for me to really learn this but I don’t expect it to be easy.

In the latter half of the year, we plan to begin the A1.1.2 class depending on how we feel about this school.

Battling Bugs on PHPSandbox

The last few weeks have been hectic and I’ve had little time to attend to bugs on PHPSandbox and hence the pile-up. I had some off time this week and was able to start drilling down on some that have been intermittent. I’ve learnt a lot in the past about making sure an app is monitorable by putting in systems to ensure that. PHPSandbox had some of these things but wasn’t progressing as the app development does. These were some of the parts I needed to put some time into to improve them so bugs can be pinpointed. The other side of this is now solving the issues.

I’ve decided majority of my work in the new week will be around the area of improving these reporting mechanisms. There is nothing like sleeping peacefully in the night knowing your app can take care of itself.

My takeaway from this is that building good and reliable software takes time and effort. Even though you need to move fast, technical debts will always slow you down in the long run. Therefore, it’s always good to optimize for speed in the long run. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all cases, so, this advice should be taken with a grain of salt.