On a wavy level - Why Flutterwave?

A couple of months ago, I decided to take a break from quite a lot of things including my job. It was largely for mental health reasons to be honest, and I also wanted to rediscover who I was yet again.

It wasn't an easy period, I stayed away from a lot of people, tried going back to a lot of things I used to love doing which was mostly coding and gaming. I didn't even get to play basketball because I just didn't want to leave my house for any reason. But that's probably talk for another article. 😅

After a while of healing and drive for self actualization, I was actively looking for my next adventure. It had to be something I was really interested in and something that would give me the opportunity to continue working on my software development skills.

So Flutterwave?

My first interest in payments began a couple years ago when I was duped by an online service provider - I could tell it was a scam, but I was like let me see first. I went on to create a solution called Scammr that could help businesses blacklist identified payment details of known fraudulent actions and help reduce the possibilities of falling prey to one generally. Never really took off hehe.

For many Nigerians and Africans like myself, payment has always been one area that has had severe limitations including the bad reputation that has restricted us. From transfering across multiple countries, to receiving payments as a freelancer or business or even general online transactions.

This is what Flutterwave is all about - providing the infrastructure that would allow Africans be connected to the global economy, accept and make payments without any form of limitation. A common misconception has been that Flutterwave is for enterprise or big companies but we are for everyone including small business owners.

Where does it tie together?

I met GB about 2 years ago and we had quite a long chat that sort of covered both our journeys and most especially, his vision for Flutterwave. It really was a no brainer when conversation started again and GB was taking no prisoners. 😀

It was simple, my career started out with me helping developers out on various community channels as a hobby all to the point where it became a job. This is exactly what I'm here to continue doing. Developer experiences have become a serious priority at Flutterwave and it was time to make our powerful solutions and continuous innovation even more easy to use for developers.

Here I get to do this for a product with global reach, understanding the plight of the developer, providing and guiding them to technical resources, getting feedback and helping the product continue to improve - The entire developer experience.

What I'd be doing

At Flutterwave, we've built (and continue to build) amazing solutions that power the next wave of payment solutions across Africa. A critical part of this journey involves the developers that get to work with our solutions and even build on it. We not only want to build developer friendly solutions, but also provide an environment where developers can feel comfortable using our technology, locating resources, getting support when needed and being a part of our community.

From the outside, I used to have a lot of complaints, and I still do. But now I'm part of a team that's going to actively work on providing solutions to these complaints and ensuring that our platforms are easy to use.

As Developer Advocate at Flutterwave, these are the things I'd be facing head on along with my team. I've spent a month here already at Flutterwave, and the first week involved understanding how customers use the product and the kind of support and information currently available to them.

It's easy to get carried away with what we are trying to build, but our priority remains the developers and what they experience using our solutions - so you can always expect to hear things as it is from me.

I am also constantly learning about the product, building on it, the libraries, the developers using it, the challenges faced and looking for ways to make this experience seamless. If you have any questions or feedback, you can always reach out to me.

This is going to be one hell of an adventure, and I am fully signed up to Ace it up!