Systems, Structures, Mastery

When winners talk you have to listen. Here is the first look at the #SquadHackathon 3.0 winner interviews! 🥇Team Block X 🥈Team SETLD 🥉Team SuperMart

Anticipate peakk We cooked on @techsibiti, cant wait to show you all what the team and I cooked!

After participating in about 15 hackathons, winning 12 across both national and international stages, judging hackathons, and mentoring a full team that went on to win, I’ve learned a lot from both wins and losses. Some of the hackathons I’ve won include Microsoft-organized hackathons, Càvistà, Squad, HelpMum, Fusion Fest Tech, Cardano, AI for Social Impact, Sui, Remostart, and the Cyber AI Hackathon organized by the American Society of Engineers. I put together something practical from all of this experience. Real lessons that actually matter in hackathons, from how to approach a problem, build the right team, pitch properly, handle demos, and position your solution in a way judges actually understand. If you’re participating in hackathons, this will really help you think differently and strategize better. Good luck in your future hackathons 🚀 dev.to/ladipo_samuel_7cfaa82…

May we never lose the drive to pursue the things we love no matter how bumpy the road is.

But there can only be one! After making it through 4 intense rounds, my team and I emerged winners of the 2026 @OfficialSquadCo Hackathon 🎉

Being a "backend engineer" is not a skill. It's a department. Moniepoint posted roles, struggled to find qualified Nigerians, and Nigerians on the internet showed their displeasure. But still, nobody touched the actual problem. This thread will make some of you uncomfortable. That's fine. It's only a problem for people who don't read with an open mind.

Backend engineering is an umbrella. Underneath it are multiple disciplines, each with its own depth, tooling, failure modes, and hiring bar. Companies like Moniepoint, Stripe, Flutterwave, Paystack, Cowrywise… They don’t just hire “backend engineers.” They hire people who can own a specific layer of the system. Let’s go through them.

The day a blind man sees. The first thing he throws away is the stick that has helped him all his life

Genius...

Nvidia is worth $5 trillion, more than the entire economy of Japan. No company in history has ever been worth more. It was started in 1993 in a Denny's diner by three engineers who put $200 each on the table. The CEO running it, Jensen Huang, grew up washing dishes at Denny's. He met two engineers at a booth in San Jose. Over cheap coffee, they started sketching out a company. Their plan was to build computer chips for video games, the kind that make 3D graphics look real on a screen. That was the pond they thought they were swimming in. Video games. Still a small industry in 1993. In 2006, Jensen made a decision that nearly killed the company. He started building software that turned his gaming chips into something more powerful. Scientists could now use them to do heavy math problems, the kind that used to require expensive supercomputers. Wall Street thought he was crazy. From 2006 to 2017, Nvidia spent close to $12 billion on this work while their revenue was only a few billion dollars a year. In 2014 alone, they put 30 cents of every dollar they made into research that was not paying off. Jensen later said it was the closest he ever came to killing his own company. Six years later, in 2012, a team at the University of Toronto built a program called AlexNet that could look at a picture and tell you what was in it. They trained it in a grad student's bedroom using two of Jensen's gaming chips that cost $500 each. They entered a contest and beat every other team in the world. Almost no one noticed. But Jensen did. He started rebuilding the entire company around teaching computers to think, even though almost nobody wanted that yet. Today, almost every AI in the world runs on Jensen's chips. In 2023, Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, said he and other tech CEOs had to spend an hour with Jensen at a sushi restaurant in Palo Alto, begging him for more chips. Jensen on the early years: "I had no idea how to do it. None of us knew how to do anything." The pond he thought he was swimming in was video games. The actual pond turned out to be every computer on the planet. The Denny's booth where it all started has a plaque on it now. It reads: "The booth that launched a trillion-dollar company." That number is now five.

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Spending my youth writing Python. What am I doing man?

Just got my order 🙂‍↔️ @swoopappng

Hey, Important announcement. Please read and order. 💜

Research papers you must read for AI Engineer interviews: 1. Attention is all you need (Transformers) 2. LoRA (Low rank adaption) 3. PEFT ( Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning) 4. VIT (Vision Transformers) 5. VAE (Variational Auto Encoder) 6. GANs ( Generative Adversarial Networks) 7. BERT ( Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers) 8. Diffusion Models (Stable Diffusion) 9. RAG (Retrieval Augment Generation) 10. GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers)

Instead of learning how to write code - Learn why an app needs a websocket - Understand polling - Know what caching is - Know why & when to optimize DB calls - Know when it should be a monolith or when MVC is best - Know how to correct and balance your CSS - know how to structure your dashboard page architecture. are you loading pages or you're routing views There are lots of things you should shift your learning focus to know that is not writing code Should you learn how to read code at the basic level? Yes.

The insane amount of learning I am about to do this break and I am really looking forward to them. 😚 Strength Wisdom Discipline Ya Allah🤲

I use this analogy a lot. This is what a room full of computers looked like in old times:

Introducing takeubackward.org Leetcode, but for machine learning.

Missing iftar because of tutorial 😭 <<<