I will also like to thank all well-wishers. May we all always have causes to celebrate.
Let me use this year's edition of my birthday celebration to thank some very special people who have helped shape my life as a software developer to this point. The words herein are in no way sufficient to express how much you have done for me, and how much you mean to me. Please accept my gratitude.
I would like to thank Aremu Oluwaseun Francis. You, more than any other person, opened the door to the world of software development for me. My very first steps as a developer were taken under your tutelage. VB.NET, C#, Windows programming, ASP.NET, Web API; the list of the stuff you taught me goes on an on. Because of you I am married to Windows *smile*.
Next, let me thank Chidiebere Ikenna Nnadi. To you, you did nothing more than just give me materials on Android development. But those materials created a new hunger in me. For the first time I could see a world way bigger than Windows and Microsoft. I may be married to Windows but because of you I started a very fierce affair with Android *wink*.
Last (but by no means the least) on my Thank You list today is Aliyu Muhammed (Andromadus MobileXP). From my very first days as a programmer I have been fascinated by the concept of an operating system. I would often daydream about being part of a crazy group of programmers who are working on this crazy operating system. I have often tried to find books and materials for operating system development, but something was always missing - a human guide. In Andromadus I have found that guide. I now have access to tools for building operating systems, as well as access to others who have gone before me in this field. To be honest I haven't been a very dilligent student in the space but I'll catch up. Operating system programming is something I thought I would be doing by 28 or 29 but now I am ahead of my time-table. With this new knowledge I feel almost complete as a software developer.
The future also looks promising. With a friend like Samuel Adeshina, who is consistently the top rated Nigerian PHP developer on PHP Classes (http://www.phpclasses.org/) I will definitely get my hands dirty in the field of artificial intelligence, and with Abdul Saidu I have already taken my first steps in game development.
Obviously, the list of those who have influenced me as a software developer goes way beyond this. And I am grateful to every one of them.
Before I conclude this post, let me just chip this in. Most of the software solutions I find myself working on these days are development tools: tools for fellow software developers. So a few weeks ago I decided to make it a hobby releasing fun apps for "regular" people every year, on my birthday. I had wanted to release a web API for interacting with a chess-playing bot, but found the time at hand really limited. I then decided to make an age-telling twitter bot. You would tweet a picture of your face to it, and it would guess your age (amongst other things) and tweet that back to you. Yes, you guessed right, it uses Microsoft Project Oxford (https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/) behind the scene. I, however, couldn't overcome my laziness to see the project through. With no pet project to talk about this year, let me use this opportunity to just mention a project we at Karabow have been working on for some time now - Unify (unifyedu.com). The project is in it's VERY EARLY stages, although we already have certain institutions trying it out. I'll write more on Unify at a later date to discuss some of the pieces of technology we had to develop in-house in order to build Unify.
Friends matter. If you can find people to point you to the right direction, happy you!
P.S: Today is a very special day indeed, even the Cosmos agrees. Today the transit of planet Mecury across the face of the sun can be witnessed from Earth, an event that occurs as rare as 13 times in a century (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/05/guide_to_the_mercury_transit_on_may_9_2016.html).
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