Jeremy Code Podcast

Jeremy Ikwuje

For ambitious people using code to create opportunities and build wealth. jeremycode.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    From an Upwork gig to founding engineer at Tando - w / Shamsudeen Adedokun

    Shamsudeen Adedokun is the founding engineer at Tando, the Kenyan app that lets people spend Bitcoin as easily as cash by bridging the Lightning Network with M-Pesa. He joined through a single Upwork gig, a basic Flutter UI prototype, and grew into running the app’s entire backend and stack. Before Tando, he spent years freelancing on Upwork. On the side, he’s building an indie spending-tracker app and a B2B SaaS for the legal space. This is the third episode with a guest. The first episode was with Megasley. Last week we talked with Samson about owning your code in the age of AI. This time we go into the story of how a Kenyan startup made Bitcoin spendable for 40 million people, and what building it taught Shamsudeen about reliability, trust, and freelancing your way into a founding role. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, and more. In this episode, we discuss: 1) The Upwork gig that became Tando * How a basic Flutter UI prototype turned into a founding-engineer role * Why the founders trusted him with the backend, the server, and the money * What “the backend engineer is the life of the company” really means 2) Building Kenya’s Bitcoin M-Pesa * How Tando lets people spend Bitcoin as easily as they spend shillings * Reliability as a feature: the IntaSend outage, and why Tando acquired Splice * Why owning your payment infrastructure matters so much in fintech 3) Advice for freelancers in Nigeria * Putting yourself out there, and getting past gatekeeping and imposter syndrome * Being true to yourself: don’t buff up a LinkedIn you can’t back up * Surviving rejection on Upwork, and how AI changed the proposal game 4) The business of free * How a no-fee app makes money, and why Tando isn’t profitable yet * Cooperation over competition in the Bitcoin space * Taking user experience and stuck transactions seriously A few lines worth highlighting: “In the Bitcoin space, when you’re actually solving the problem, money comes to you.” —Shams “You have to put yourself in a market that’s outside your own.” — Shams “Don’t just start jumping from one role to another when you don’t have the experience, because it will show.” — Shams “There’s really no clocking out in fintech.” — Jeremy “Of all the jobs I’ve gotten, it was all by recommendation.” - Jeremy Where to find Shamsudeen: * LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/shamsudeen-adedokun * Yet (his indie app): https://byrde.app Where to find me: * X: https://x.com/jeremyikwuje * LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ijsucceed Referenced in this episode: * Tando: https://tando.me * bitcoin.co.ke (every M-Pesa number becomes a Lightning address): https://bitcoin.co.ke * Upwork: https://www.upwork.com * Companies and names mentioned: Splice, IntaSend, M-Pesa, Bitnob, Tapnob, Mavapay, Chipper Cash, Payday, Grey, Patricia, Flutter, DevFest, Bitcoin++ and Bitcoin Nairobi If you’d like to get new updates from Jeremy Code’s Podcast as it drops, subscribe! Full transcript Lightly edited for clarity. The story of Tando Jeremy: Hi, guys. It’s another good time again to have a wonderful conversation with a very good friend. Last episode I had a conversation with Samson, where we talked about how you have to be responsible for whatever code you write. It doesn’t matter whether I write the code or you write it yourself. Today is going to be a bit different, and it’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be more of a background story of a company based in Kenya that has been letting people spend Bitcoin like money in Kenya. And today with me is Shamsudeen from Tando. Shamsudeen is a software engineer, and he has been the guy from day one. Welcome, Shamsudeen. Shamsudeen: Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you so much. Jeremy: Okay, guys. So I met you at the Bitcoin dev meeting in Abuja. In 2024, before the [African Bitcoin Conference] event started. People started talking about, you know, “Tando, Tando.” And I was like, what is Tando? Throughout that entire Bitcoin conference, people just kept talking about Tando, Tando, Tando. And that made me realize you guys built something really good. I never knew the guy who built the software lives in Abuja. I was talking with my co-founder (Onionsman), asking, who are these guys that built the app? It meant you guys really prepared for this event, because when it started we began to hear of Tando. And it makes sense, because you were able to get an initial user base who needed the service so badly. Nigerians coming to Kenya, many people coming to Kenya, they have Bitcoin, they want to spend it. So just tell me how the whole thing started from day one. As we met, I got to know you were the developer who really started the whole thing. So get us to the beginning. Shamsudeen: Okay. So if anybody doesn’t know, Tando is an app that allows you to spend Bitcoin in Kenya. One thing everybody says when you tell them about Bitcoin or crypto is, “is it actually money? It’s digital money, but what can you use it for?” That’s been a question for a very long time, because if you want to spend your Bitcoin, you have to sell it. That kind of made people feel it’s not really money. It’s money, but not really spendable. So the whole magic is the founders, Jason and Sabina. Because Tando is an incredibly simple app, a utility tool, but it makes a huge difference. I’ve been a software engineer [professionally] for about five years now, I think this is the sixth year. And primarily I’ve been freelancing on Upwork. Jeremy: Upwork. Okay, so you guys are the ones making all the freelance money. Shamsudeen: Yeah, when you’re in Nigeria, everybody wants to be a global talent. You have to put yourself in a market that’s outside your own. And it was working, freelancing on Upwork. But as a freelancer, anybody who freelances will know this: most times you just need one or two clients, because if you have a good relationship with somebody, you’re going to keep working with them. Jeremy: So how did they [Tando founders] meet you? How were they able to get you going? Give us that background story. Shamsudeen: So I got an invite to check out a job post on Upwork. It was just a basic UI prototype, that was the little, a Flutter prototype. I was like, oh okay, this is just UI. So I did the UI. At the time there was another developer, Dedan; he’s Kenyan, and he worked on the backend. When I delivered the prototype, it was up to Jason, the founder, and he did the connection. This was just to test if it was actually going to work: basically, if a user sends Bitcoin to a specific lightning node, will they be able to pay out. And when it worked, it was like, okay, this is looking good. Then Jason came back and we started polishing the app more and more. After a couple of months, the app was in a very stable state and we were able to upload it to the stores. Around that time there was a very bad protest in Kenya, so the other developer [Dedan] was off for a while. I had worked on backend stuff before, so I stepped in, and that’s how I started working on the backend too. Jeremy: So you came in as a mobile app developer, a front-end developer, just to build the front end. But then you ended up working on the backend and the whole stack of Tando in general. Makes sense. And the relationship was really good? It must have been really good working with them. It’s been almost two years now. Shamsudeen: Over two years actually, two years and about six months. Jeremy: That means you must have been very good working with them, and you’ve made so much progress. I think last year, when Sabina posted, was it one million transactions? Shamsudeen: I’m not sure I’m at liberty to disclose the exact amount, but we’re way beyond that. Way beyond. Let’s say three or four million. Jeremy: So people spend Bitcoin like that in Kenya? Shamsudeen: Yeah. I think it also really appeals to foreigners. I was in Kenya for Bitcoin++ and Bitcoin Nairobi.Jeremy: That was a few months ago. And you did not go with cash. Shamsudeen: I went with cash, like one hundred and fifty dollars. Jeremy: But I like the way you guys were able to strategically launch the app at a very good time, when there was an event happening in Nairobi. If you look at most Bitcoin products, they’re mostly in Nigeria. And there’s never been a major Bitcoin conference in Nigeria where people push a particular Bitcoin app in the country. There are all these apps, and they just come one day and say, hey guys, we launched a new app, and people start using it. But you guys were able to launch at a very good time. Shamsudeen: Yes, it was the right idea at the right time. And this is why I keep saying the magic is in the founders, because making sure you launch something like that at the right time is very important. That, combined with reliability, and the two founders being based in Kenya. Jeremy: Based in Kenya. And you guys have most of the grant money. Last year it was just back to back, right? Shamsudeen: I think that’s one thing about the Bitcoin space: when you’re actually solving the problem, money comes to you. Jeremy: Exactly. But the guys who’ve been having problems, I don’t know if maybe they’ve applied, or maybe it’s because of the commercials around their product. Shamsudeen: In Africa in general, Kenya is, I think you must have seen this, they say Kenya is a Bitcoin country. Actually, like Nigeria, it’s a bit of a hassle. Crypto is technically banned, so all these crypto companies have to go through loopholes. I know there’s a gray area on crypto in Kenya, but Kenya is the Bitcoin country. Jeremy: If not for the fact that we Nigerians are very resilient, this country wouldn’t have experienced the kind of innovation it has, because people just keep pushing. I remember the first time I launched my first company, it was a Bitcoin rewards app, where you could buy airtime, pay bills, and get cash back in SATs

    From an Upwork gig to founding engineer at Tando - w / Shamsudeen Adedokun

  2. Aug 31

    Your code is your responsibility, even when AI wrote it — Samson Olusegun, Sofware Engineer at Mavapay

    Samson Olusegun is a software engineer at Mavapay, a fintech that moves money across borders over Bitcoin. He runs the entire backend and infrastructure stack, from DevOps and cloud architecture down to the handoff from development into production. Trained in economics, he is also a self-described data guy who tinkers with real-world datasets in his spare time, including a price index for Nigerian markets that he has been building for the past year. This is the conversation we tried to record once before, until the Nigerian internet had other plans. This time we sat down in the same space, offline, and got into it. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, and more. In this episode, we discuss: 1) Owning your code in the age of AI * What does “your code is your responsibility” actually mean when an AI wrote the code? * The rate bug that quietly cost my company money, and what it taught me * Why “the AI wrote it” doesn’t get you off the hook, and how that echoes an old idea from aviation 2) How a lean fintech team ships safely, and fast * The exact steps Samson’s team runs before any code reaches production * When is it fine to reach for Claude Code, and when is it not? * How Mavapay once switched payment providers overnight and still shipped to production 3) Partners, standards, and the fintech stack * Why the wrong partner can sink even a great engineering team * The virtual-card deal that fell apart, and what it cost * Paystack versus the old guard: how API standards diverge, and why good docs matter more than people think 4) Beyond fintech: a price index for Nigeria * The side project born from watching market prices change day to day * Crowdsourcing data on a “verify, don’t trust” principle * Why Samson doesn’t trust official inflation numbers, and what a rolling price index could fix A few lines that stuck with me: “If you break the system, they’re not going to call the AI. They’re going to call you.” “AI itself is just a black box. It’s what you feed into it that it gives you back.” “Test like your life depends on it.” “In fintech, a partner either breaks you or makes you.” “I’m not concerned about what the seller is selling. I’m concerned about what the buyer buys.” Where to find Samson Olusegun: * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samson-olusegun/ * X: https://x.com/nully0x * Mavapay: https://mavapay.co Where to find me: * https://x.com/jeremyikwuje Referenced in this episode: * Your code is your responsibility, even if AI wrote it (the Senko Rašić post that sparked the theme): https://blog.senko.net/your-code-is-your-responsibility-even-if-ai-wrote-it * Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code * The Big Mac Index (The Economist): https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index * Companies and tools mentioned: Mavapay, Sudo, Bridgecard, Miden, Quidax, Paystack, Flutterwave, Interswitch, Remita, E-Tranzact, Binance, Mintlify, Swagger, Postman, Starlink, Spectranet The full transcript of this episode is available in the Transcript tab. It has been lightly edited for clarity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremycode.substack.com

    Your code is your responsibility, even when AI wrote it — Samson Olusegun, Sofware Engineer at Mavapay

  3. Aug 18

    Building Fintech #2: What is Fintech?

    Jambo builders. Welcome to episode #2 of Building Fintech by Jeremy Code Podcast. Building Fintech is a podcast series for fintech nerds. In this episode, you’ll get into the basics- the very basics- of what Fintech is about. Let’s get started. When I was a kid, my dad used to go to the bank to send us money, and we normally went to a nearby bank branch (same bank) to withdraw it as cash. But today I sent money to my dad from my phone, and he received it and spent it with his debit card. But I don’t use a bank. I use a fintech. What, exactly, is FinTech? FinTech in full is financial technology. Two words: financial and technology. Fintech is a technology that makes financial services faster, cheaper and easier to use. Technology today is mainly software. Software can be a mobile app, a website, a chatbot, or a digital platform. Financial services are mainly payments, loans, savings and investing. FinTech means using software, mobile apps, websites, chatbots or digital platforms to make payments, loans, savings or investing cheaper, easier and faster. We use fintech every day. The app on your phone that lets you send money, pay a bill, or buy crypto is a fintech. It is not a bank Most people think of fintech or define fintech as a bank. But they see it as a bank with an app. This is not correct, and it is also misleading. FinTech is not a company or organisation. It is a technology that we can use to access financial services faster, easier and cheaper. The app on your phone that lets you send money is a fintech, but the app might be developed by an individual, not necessarily a company. The app might also be developed by X Bank, but if the app is open-sourced, even if the bank shuts down, the app will continue to serve people. Describing a company as a fintech is like describing Jeremy as a fintech. Even if I build an app that lets you send money, you won’t say I’m a “Fintech”. You’ll refer to me as a Fintech developer or operator. For instance, Bitcoin is not a bank. Bitcoin is a financial technology. Bitcoin is fintech. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, is not a banker. And Bitcoin does not have any banking or investment license. But millions of people around the world invest and send money home with Bitcoin. FinTech is built by individuals and companies that usually don’t hold a banking license. So you see, Satoshi Nakamoto is not a banker. He doesn’t even own a bank license. But he was able to create software that is used to move billions around the world every single day. I’ve built dozens of fintech apps. I’m not a banker; today, I still don’t have any physical banking experience. But I was able to build an app that let millions of people send, save, borrow, and invest. However, a situation where I named my app Jeremy - then you will mostly know Jeremy as a Fintech. Which is why the average person can refer to a company or bank as FinTech when the name of the app is also the name of the bank. The major reason people think fintech is a bank is that fintech is not only technology, but technology plus finance. As I explained earlier, fintech is short for financial technology. And it’s usually connected on top of an existing banking service, which makes it faster, cheaper and more accessible than the underlying banks. Without fintech, I would have to go to a bank building to send money to my mum and wait for hours or days. But because my bank created an app that allows me to send money more easily, faster, and cheaper. Five Categories of FinTech The most successful fintech companies are payment companies. But fintech is not just payments. It is a set of distinct things, and each of those things is solving a different problem. When Bob sent $100 to Alice from his iPhone, it’s a payment. When Alice buys Bitcoin and holds for a future return, that’s wealth and investing. Since you are going to be building fintech, here are five categories I want to talk about: The first is Payments Payment is a financial technology that moves money from one person or business to another. You can think of PayPal, Stripe, and M-Pesa. This is really where beginners start. If you’re jumping into fintech, I always recommend you start with payment, because it’s at the core, at the centre of anything that you will ever build. You have to touch payment. Doesn’t matter what fintech you’re building, you’ll find a way to touch payment. So building a payment app is where you should likely start. Payment apps are the most decorated fintechs; nearly all fintech app, every fintech software do payment. And building a business around payment is not that complicated. The business model is usually transactional. That’s why payment companies are the most valuable companies in fintech in the world. Payment companies were the first unicorns in the world: PayPal, Worldpay, Alipay, and Wise and all these guys- they are the biggest fintech companies in the world today, M-Pesa and all. So arguably, fintech is generally seen as payment technologies because nearly all fintech touches payment. Banking Infrastructure (BaaS) The second kind of fintech category is banking infrastructure, or in this case, banking as a service. It is like the plumbing that lets a company offer bank accounts, cards or mobile wallets without becoming a licensed bank itself. This is the least visible category and arguably the most important one to understand as an engineer. Once you start building around payments, you want to move further; if you really, truly want to become a fintech nerd, try to build a banking infrastructure; try to build a banking service that allows other fintechs to issue virtual accounts, cards, access bank accounts, and make payouts; a good example would be building a global fintech such as Stripe, Rain.xyz, Bridge, and regional examples such as Flutterwave, Mono, and Sudo. Most BaaS can still fit in as a payment fintech because they enable payments for other payment fintechs, but they heavily use existing banking infrastructure. Their system is connecting directly to a bank. It is important that a BaaS is not to be confused with a fintech reselling APIs of another BaaS, or a BaaS aggregator. For instance, Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, issues accounts and payment rails by connecting directly to banking partners and card networks. Then there is OnePipe, a Nigerian fintech that pools APIs from multiple banks and BaaS providers into a single unified gateway. The former is BaaS; the latter is an aggregator, not BaaS. Building a Banking as a Service infrastructure gives you an experience the average fintech nerd lacks as things get low-level. You are not just building a payment system; you are building what powers an ecosystem, from treasury management to ecommerce. I would liken Crypto Wallet as a Service infrastructure as a new kind of BaaS. Remember, crypto is an end-to-end financial technology. In a hyper crypto world, we don’t need a bank. We can send, receive, lend, and invest without ever touching a traditional banking service. Building a Crypto Wallet Infrastructure is tedious, just like building a traditional BaaS. It is what powers crypto exchanges, stablecoin apps, and crypto payment gateways. Building one puts you in a position where you can build anything in crypto. Lending The third one is lending, which basically is assessing risk, assessing credit risk and disbursing loans digitally, often to people that can’t really get a loan from a bank. You might have heard the whole idea of financial inclusion. Actually, the core of it is that you build a system that is able to provide a loan to someone who, without the system, will not be able to get that loan from a bank. From 2017 to 2022, many fintech startups were trying to solve financial inclusion across Africa. Basically, they built an app that lets anyone access a loan. Today there are so many fintechs in Nigeria offering loans, so many loan apps across Africa, even if they’re loan sharks. But they make it easy so that with only your bank statement, you can be able to get access to a loan. You don’t need to own a business; you don’t need collateral. These loan apps scan your bank statement, contact list, and public record of your credit/loan default history and quote an amount you are eligible for. It’s an important fintech category and easily profitable when default is low. Operating a loan app won’t just teach you the technicalities of lending but also consumer behaviors and how the ability to pay is different from willingness to pay. Wealth and Investing Then we have wealth and investing apps that let ordinary people invest, save, or trade. It lowers the barrier that used to require a broker. Prior to 2015, if you wanted to buy a stock, you had to go to a broker's office. A senior friend told me he bought stock in 2010. And they gave him a paper, a certificate, and he has been keeping that certificate for a long time. If he wants to liquidate his stock, he has to take that paper to the company again. So there’s a lot of manual process in between. Today people use their phone to buy and sell stock. They invest in GOOG, AAPL, AMZN, TSLA without going to a broker's office. We invest in Gold, Bitcoin, Crypto, and precious metals from our Laptops. We even bet crypto on Polymarkets and lose a lot of money. Fintech that allow us to do this are in the wealth and investing category. Insurtech There are fewer fintechs in this category, but they apply the same “unbundle and rebuild digitally” concept; they apply the same concept with all those categories we’ve mentioned, but then they apply it to insurance. I subscribe to health insurance from an app, and everything took less than 10 minutes. In my dad's generation, he would take two weeks. Fintech made this possible. Payments, Banking as a Service, Lending, Wealth, and Insurtech are the five major categories in Fintech. Nearly every fintech company you can name fi

    Building Fintech #2: What is Fintech?

  4. Aug 13

    Building Fintech #1: How a 3AM Paystack Integration Started My Fintech Career

    Hi, guys. Welcome to Building Fintech by Jeremy Code. A weekly show where I share important concepts and topics in Fintech. Jeremy Code is a podcast for fintech nerds building in Africa. This will be the first-ever episode on how I got into Fintech. So you can NFT it. It’s going to be weekly, where I will publish once a week, but you might get more than one piece of content in a week. Just to give you guys some background information, my name is Jeremy “Code” Ikwuje. I have been working professionally since 2020. I started my coding journey as far back as 2017 during my undergraduate studies. How I got into fintech started with a phone call in October 2018. I received a call from a friend who was trying to come up with a site for a client, and the client needed a payment system on the site. The client wanted to accept payment from Nigerians. My friend called to ask if I knew any payment system to integrate. I recommended Paystack. I’ve been following up with the Paystack story on Techpoint, so it was an easy recommendation. So he went in and looked at Paystack and how he could integrate it, but he had some difficulties with it. He reached out to me again and told me that he’s trying to integrate Paystack into his website, but he’s unable to write it in PHP at the time. I said, okay, I’ll just try my best to look at it and then get back to you. I was in class at the time he called, and I went back to the hostel. I picked up my laptop, and throughout that night I consumed the entire Paystack documentation. Payment gateways were still new in Africa, so it was hard to find a really good article at the time on integrating with PHP. Today it would be easier because AI is here and can help you integrate the entire thing end to end. I was able to integrate the Paystack checkout payment that night, and I sent my friend a sample code, and he was able to implement it, and it worked. But then I felt, instead of me just giving him a sample code, let me write an article on this. Funny enough, at the time, I was trying out blogging for some side income as a student. So I put out the article on the internet, and about a week or two, developers began to reach out to me to send them more sample code, asking me questions about how to integrate it. I was jumping on a call at least once a week to help someone out. I started getting gigs from small business owners asking me to setup payment system for them. That single article brought in a client that sent me my first million naira in 2020. That was when I knew that fintech is going to be a big thing, especially in Africa, because every new week a new fintech startup springs up and you see that they are integrated with Paystack. That was how I got into payment and fintech. Since then, I left school and got my first job in 2020 for a real estate investment company, and I built a payment system for them to be able to receive investment from their clients and disburse to vendors. Within 6 months, they were able to process more than a million dollars. That same year, I got another gig for a crowdfunding app that let users invest in farmland; remember FarmCrowdy? I went on to start my own company in 2021 to allow people to buy Bitcoin before winding it down in 2022. I’ve gone on to work for several startups, mostly payments companies, including contracting for Paystack. In 2023, I launched Monierate.xyz with my cofounder, an FX data aggregator with over 10 million pageviews. Today, I mostly work around stablecoins and cross-border payments. Currently the lead engineer at Spendin, the Revolut of Africa. The last six to seven years have been a very good ride in the fintech space, and there are still more niches in fintech. Fintech is something that we need, especially in Africa. I’ll recommend anyone starting a tech career, especially in Africa, to go into Fintech. There are more successful startups in Fintech than any other startup category you can think of. VC loves fintech, and it is important to follow the money. We are going to see a trillion-dollar fintech soon. In the Building Fintech series, I’ll be sharing everything I know about building fintech, explaining every single important concept. If you haven’t subscribed to my Jeremy Code newsletter, now will be a good time to do so. New content will drop every week. You can search for Jeremy Code on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast app. Thank you for subscribing. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremycode.substack.com

    Building Fintech #1: How a 3AM Paystack Integration Started My Fintech Career

  5. Aug 11

    Coding Won't Make You Rich. Here is What to do

    This post doesn’t apply to the Mark Zuckerberg of this world, who wrote a few lines of code, never spoke to anyone except a friend and became a billionaire. This is a post for 99% of Gen Z software engineers out there. I’ve never had time for consistently making content out there. I created my first blog in 2016, then another in 2018, then another in 2020, each time on a new domain name. But I didn’t publish more than 10 articles for each. The truth is, I never took content creation seriously because of what my teacher told me: “Boy, stop making content and become a great coder.” lol. No matter how I tried, that statement made me place less value on writing and even podcasting. I considered them low-value tasks, even if every year-end I would feel I should have written more out there. No matter what great code I write, I regret not writing the previous year. Blogging. Podcasting. YouTube. TikToking. Substacking. I tried them, but after a few days in, I would stop. Do you know my first Substack was in 2021? But then I stopped writing after one month. Well, not anymore. Because I now have a different mindset about values. You see, there are only four value ladders. The first ladder is Implementation, and it is the lowest form of value. This is you doing the thing, doing the actual work; the coding. Every software engineer who only writes code is on this first ladder — Implementation. Software engineers are implementers. Implementers don’t take any risk. They just do the thing they are mostly asked to fix. Plumbers, auto mechanics, coders, including hired pirates, are implementers. And they usually earn minimum wage in any market, as they are the lowest on the ladder. But software engineers are high-value implementers; they usually earn above the median. If the annual minimum wage in a market is $100, software engineers earn between $500 and $1,000. The high-value implementers can earn 10x the minimum wage. But it rarely gets past that. In California, the annual minimum wage is $31k to $36k; most software engineers there earn between $142k and $161k — around 5x. Top-value engineers earn $250k to $350k (~10x). Now take the same job, implementation, in two other markets using dollar value. In London, the minimum wage is around $33,750 a year. Software engineers earn $94,500 to $121,500 — about 3x. Top engineers hit $162,000 to $202,500 (~7x). In Lagos, the minimum wage is around $540 a year. Software engineers earn $3,870 to $5,420 from local employers — 7x to 10x the minimum wage. It hardly gets past 10x. It’s almost impossible to get paid more than $300k writing code alone. Any higher earnings are no longer just engineers but project managers, team leads, vp, and engineering managers, which leads us to the second level of value — Unification. These are people who provide value by unifying things. They bring implementers (engineers who just code) together to get a job done. They are paid for managing others. A chief security officer earns more than the security guy at the gate. A site contractor earns more than his most skilled workman. A software engineer who manages other software engineers is no longer just writing code. He now manages others. And takes some risks. If a project goes bad, he is to blame. He is paid not only because he can code but also because he can get others to code. A great example is an engineering manager/lead. An engineering manager is usually paid more than the average software engineer. Their base pay is usually the average of what software engineers earn, sometimes several times over. In California, engineering managers earn $180,000 to $270,000 on average, with top earners reaching $350,000 to $410,000. In London, they earn $189,000 to $297,000, with top earners at $337,500 to $405,000. In Lagos, engineering managers earn $11,610 to $23,225, with top earners at $30,970 to $38,710. The big difference between an Implementation and Unification is the communication level. An implementer might not need to communicate to anyone other than her direct team lead. But the team would communicate to everyone and also to the VP.The reason you can never be rich just writing code in a company is that you hardly communicate to anyone outside your office peers or lead. You are economically limited by your circle of audience. I’ve seen a few guys in Lagos who used to just code before now earning as high as $100K annually. Way more than engineering managers earn in the country. In the US, you will find many “former engineers” who now earn up to $2m annually. Well, if you look closely, it is not just a company paying them that amount. They are now podcasting, running a YouTube channel, a paid app, a startup, or selling online courses and books. They are now communicating more. creating content and code out there for others. The third and fourth levels of value are Communication and Imagination. People who earn from communicating or their imaginations. This is where the highest money is made in any career. When you begin to communicate and create things. No matter how small. I read about a software engineer in Australia who was learning to code, then created a website called Sitepoint to help other people learn to code. He became a dollar millionaire. I read a paper that said a rich programmer is no longer a “programmer.” Funny, but to some degree, true. Gergely Orosz, author of Pragmatic Engineer and millionaire software engineer, is a famous podcaster and runs one of the largest Substack newsletters. Taylor Otwell of Laravel went from earning an average salary to driving a Lamborghini after building Laravel, the most used open source web framework. He is no longer a “programmer”; he is a creator and innovator. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, used to be a project manager. A key difference between a project manager who unifies others to get a project done and a CEO is that the company thrives or dies by the CEO’s imagination and communication. The more innovative he is, the more successful Google becomes. Coding won’t make you rich. Communicating your code and the value of it in a new way that increases your circle of influence and surface area of luck will. Coding is now a productized labour; all we need is to burn energy (Claude tokens). How good are your ideas? Unless you are Elon Musk, a master of attention who never made it by coding alone. Or you are Zuckerberg, who created a social network at 19, at the right time and place, but never created anything else successful since then. But you are not, and 99% of coding ideas today will be dead on GitHub in two weeks. But if you can turn the flip and entertain or educate from your coding ideas, you will see how lucrative that is. I was discussing this with a friend, and he said, “But how about footballers? They just kick the ball. They are implementing the game.” Well, I said, they are not just kicking the ball; each kick is a communication because people watch them. The reason why they are paid more is that they are communicating more than the average software engineer. Whatever is not communicating to people is not economically viable. Entertainment is a form of communication, and it requires a lot of imagination to thrive. Football began to thrive richly when players started having a lot of speaking engagements before, during, and after games. A comment Lamine Yamal made after a game against Real Madrid will have more engagement than the match highlights. That is why Adidas paid him $34m. But you don’t want to start a career with communication and creativity as your main source of income. No. It’s hard and takes time. You won’t make money the first few years creating a coding channel, building a new AI app, or publishing courses. You are better off starting with implementation as your main source of income, a job that pays you to code today. The reason is that there is no lower bound as to how much a communicator can make. They can make $0 or $100m. It is the reason why you used to be richer than your friend who started a YouTube channel 6 years ago rather than getting a job, but you are still earning from job to job today while your friend is a millionaire teaching people how to code online and yet never worked for a serious company. But you would’ve been better off both at the beginning and now if you had also taken your communication and creativity beyond the circuit board of your company. But you didn’t see any real value communicating out there and not being paid monthly. The high-earning communicators don’t earn monthly; they earn big. It is also the reason why your friend has been building products without a job for more than 8 years now, but he is still broke. Because when you earn from your creativity, it takes time; and you can earn as little as zero and as much as a million. You don’t want to be friend B, but you also don’t want to be friend A at the start of your career. You want to start as an implementer and get paid to code, while creating content out there beyond where you work. In any career, including software, if you ever want to earn big, the most important skill you can develop is communication. From implementation to imagination, the highest earners in each ladder are the ones who communicate better. A founder who communicates more and improves will raise more money and build more successful products than the one who hardly communicates. You are not improving in your communication if you are always communicating to the same people. Increase follows attention and vice versa. This is why I have decided to take writing and podcasting consistently going forward. I now consider communication a much more valuable activity than writing code. It is now my most important job. I admonish you to do the same. Take your communication seriously. Start an X blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a Substack, or even a physical meetup and communicate with people. If you are going to

    Coding Won't Make You Rich. Here is What to do

  6. Jul 16

    Megasley: Early days, Coding, Bitcoin, AI, & Claude Code | Jeremy Code

    The following conversation is with Megasley, general manager of Africa Free Routing, one of the few Bitcoin Lightning Node services in Africa, and the first active lightning node in Nigeria. Megasley is a software engineer who works with Bitcoiner Africa, a non-profit organisation documenting the development of Bitcoin in Africa. He has spent the last four years of his life travelling to over ten countries across Africa and Europe, preaching the gospel of Bitcoin and Lightning to developers. He loves to go to church wherever he travels. I remember when we first met in 2022, in the city of Accra, at a Bitcoin Conference; he was telling me how much he would love to be at Shiloh, a yearly conference organised by the Living Faith Church, Nigeria. He is a bright, young, humble, and amazing individual. And now, dear friends, this is the Jeremy Code Podcast. Let’s listen to Megasley. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremycode.substack.com

    Megasley: Early days, Coding, Bitcoin, AI, & Claude Code | Jeremy Code
  • 6 Episodes

About

For ambitious people using code to create opportunities and build wealth. jeremycode.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Jeremy Ikwuje
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Jeremy Code
  • Show Website
    Jeremy Code Podcast