Blog

Writing from Oluwatosin Alli on engineering, building products, and technology.

• Why I Still Read My Bible Before I Read Stack Overflow 2026-09-04

  On the daily habit that's stayed constant through nine years of changing tech stacks, two companies, and more late nights than I'd like to admit.

• Scaling Hustlrs: Lessons From Nigeria's Gig Economy 2026-08-07

  Growing Hustlrs, a task-auction marketplace built for how Nigerians actually hustle, surfaced trust and verification problems no textbook prepared me for.

• The Manor Restaurant and the Unsexy Art of POS Systems 2026-07-17

  Shipping comprehensive restaurant management for The Manor Restaurant meant treating a 'boring' point-of-sale system with the seriousness usually reserved for fintech.

• What Nine Years of Freelancing From Abuja to Alabama Taught Me About Grace 2026-07-03

  Looking back on nearly a decade building software remotely for companies from Miami to Alabama — the hard lessons, the unfair contracts, and the grace that got me through both.

• Duolingo for Couples: The Side Project I Can't Stop Thinking About 2026-06-26

  A lighthearted look at my ongoing side-project obsession: a gamified relationship app inspired by Duolingo's streaks, built with the same person who keeps pushing me to build in public.

• The Doyen Academy LMS and the Joy of Building for Teachers 2026-06-19

  Building a learning management system for Doyen Academy turned into one of the more meaningful projects of my career — because the users were teachers, not metrics.

• .NET Core vs Node.js: What NBU's School Management System Taught Me About Choosing Stacks 2026-06-12

  Building the Nigerian British University school management system meant choosing .NET Core over my Node.js instincts — a decision about the client's world, not my preferences.

• CEO by Day, Committer by Night: Running Hustlrs and Nadiron Without Losing the Code 2026-06-05

  Balancing CEO responsibilities at Hustlrs Nigeria and Nadiron Technologies with an inability to fully let go of the codebase — and what I've learned about delegating well.

• Why Zypher Assets Made Me Actually Learn Finance 2026-05-29

  Building the investment platform Zypher Assets forced me past the engineer's comfort zone into actual financial literacy — and made me a better fintech developer for it.

• Prayer Before Production: A Deploy-Day Ritual 2026-05-22

  Why I still pause and pray before a production deploy, even after nearly a decade of shipping software — and what that habit has quietly changed.

• The Night Pictoshot's Smart Contract Almost Ate Our Gas Budget 2026-05-15

  A minting bug on Pictoshot's NFT marketplace nearly turned a test deploy into a very costly lesson in smart contract economics.

• Memora and the Problem With 'Just Another Social App' 2026-05-08

  Building Memora's real-time social platform meant solving for feed latency and presence before a single feature felt 'next-gen' to anyone.

• Abuja Isn't Silicon Valley, and That's the Point 2026-05-01

  A love letter, complaint, and business case for building serious software out of Abuja instead of chasing a relocation story.

• Building Estelle: An AI Agent for People Who Hate Talking About Themselves 2026-04-24

  Inside Estelle, the AI agent I'm building to help introverted, high-skill people build a personal brand without pretending to be extroverts online.

• What Babcock Taught Me About Computer Science (That Wasn't on the Syllabus) 2026-04-17

  Reflecting on a Computer Science degree with an AI specialization at Babcock University — and the parts of that education that had nothing to do with code.

• Sunday Service, Monday Standup 2026-04-09

  A Babcock-trained habit I almost dropped when the startup grind got loud — and why picking it back up made the rest of my week better, not worse.

• Teaching a Machine to Read Receipts: Inside p2pdex.io's PDF Pipeline 2026-04-02

  How p2pdex.io generates clean, automated payment receipts in TypeScript — the type errors, the layout math, and the one bug that only showed up on Android.

• Why I Left the CTO Chair to Build My Own Thing 2026-03-26

  Leaving a comfortable CTO role to found Hustlrs and Nadiron Technologies wasn't a career move — it was closer to a calling I kept ignoring until I couldn't.

• March 24: The 'Shy Architect' Paradox 2026-03-24

  A raw look at the developer’s dilemma: balancing enterprise-level TypeScript builds for clients, the push for AI at Estelle, and the personal hurdle of hosting my first webinar.

• The New Home: A New Chapter 2026-03-23

  Nine years building for others—from Babcock to CTO—and why tosinxt.com is my own digital home, laboratory, and welcome mat.