I own things through production

I'm based in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and trained as a software engineer at IAI Yaoundé (an engineering diploma in computer science and a Licence in software engineering, both awarded with distinction). Most of what I've built since has been for institutional clients: a national real-estate company, government digital-observatory programmes across West and Central Africa, and municipal authorities managing their own data. That work rarely comes with a spec you can trust - it comes with an existing system, a client who understands the problem better than the technology, and a deadline set by someone else's budget cycle.

I've led three of those engagements end to end - architecture, delivery, and the on-site work of standing up infrastructure inside a client's own datacenter rather than a managed cloud. That included training the people who'd actually run the system after I left, and writing documentation so the next engineer wouldn't need me on a call. I'm currently a Junior Solutions Architect and DevOps engineer, which in practice means as much time on Kubernetes manifests and code-review standards as on application code.

A good part of that work turned out to be geospatial - PostGIS, GeoServer, Elasticsearch, mapping APIs - because most of the systems I was asked to build had a location at the center of them: where a property sits, where a service gets delivered, where a boundary actually falls. It isn't a specialisation I set out to have; it's the shape of the problems that kept showing up.

I work in French (C1) and English (B1), from UTC+1, which overlaps most of the European working day and the morning in the Americas. Distributed work doesn't change what makes software good - it just removes the option of clarifying a decision by walking over to someone's desk, so I write more down and assume less.