From The Village to The Cloud: My life in five minutes

I grew up in Uhembe, a small village in Siaya County, Kenya. At ten years old, my “tech stack” consisted of sheep, goats, and soccer balls made from sisal-wrapped polythene.

When my grandmother — a retired teacher — asked what I wanted to become, I had a rehearsed answer: A Catholic priest.

It was the most respected profession I knew.

That changed the day a cousin visited from Nairobi. He casually mentioned a word I had never heard before: Aeronautical Engineer. "They make airplanes," he said.

I didn't fully understand what that meant, but something shifted. A new map had been unlocked. From that day on, I wasn't going to be a priest. I was going to be an engineer.

We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.~ Trevoh Noah

University didn't go as planned.

I missed the cutoff for Engineering, applied to several programs, got rejected four times, and eventually landed in Computer Science at Chuka University — almost by accident. It was simply the closest thing to "engineering" on the list.

I didn't own a computer—but I knew my way around one. I learned on my elder brother's Compaq CRT, where I spent hours playing GTA: Vice City.

My introduction to programming was brutal. A friend Bluetooth-shared a PDF titled “C++ for Dummies” to my phone. I spent weeks copying code onto paper, memorizing syntax I didn't understand, trying to fit in.

I vividly remember freezing when that same friend asked me to write a program to generate prime numbers. I had been “compiling” code in my head — but I didn't actually know how to program.

That moment hurt. But it stayed with me.

// I memorized this for weeks before I ever ran it
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
  cout << "Hello, World!";
  return 0;
}

The turning point was a guy in class writing JavaScript on his phone. I peeked over his shoulder and saw the word "banana" inside a distinct array.

I thought, Wait, we use fruit names to make apps?

Curiosity took over. That moment turned into a friendship, and that friendship turned into long nights in dorm rooms, fueled by Indomie noodles and soy meat. We wrote PHP servers and Bootstrap UIs endlessly, watched The Vampire Diaries, and built a hostel booking system that actually worked.

It failed — not because the code was bad, but because we didn't know how to talk to users.

That lesson never left me.

My path forward wasn't linear.

• →I dropped out of university to join a Andela (bootcamp) in my 2nd year. I failed.
• →I got my first job as a frontend dev. I was fired three months later — AngularJS broke me.
• →I did music production for upcoming artists as a hobby to sustain myself
• →I joined another 1 year bootcamp, Microverse, where I met friends from Pakistan, Hungary, Nigeria and finally understood how global technology really is.
• →After the bootcamp, I went through a rigorous data structures and algorithms phase that led to multiple interviews and ultimately landed me a role as a Software Developer at Remotask (Scale AI).
• →Eventually, I went back to finish my degree while working.
• →Two years later, I left Scale AI and went on to work with a German logistics company, Logic Solutions (Schryver Logistics), and later on a contract with the Ministry of Defence in Kenya. Along the way, I interviewed with companies like GitLab and others—but in the end, I chose to take the founder route.

What was meant to take four years took eight. But by the time I graduated, I wasn't just a student with theory — I was a builder with scars, context, and humility.

Today, I work as a product engineer, primarily building independently.

I focus on identifying real problems, shipping small solutions quickly, validating them with users, and iterating based on feedback. Some projects grow. Others don't. Both outcomes matter.

I'm the founder of Tunu Store a platform used by over 120,000 people to help African creators monetize their work. It's one example of my broader interest in building tools that support people at scale.

Technically, my work is increasingly centered on solving problems using applied AI, particularly in automations, decision-making, and making complex information usable.

I'm preparing to pursue graduate studies through programs such as Erasmus Mundus (EDISS) or EUMaster4HPC, or equivalent pathways, with the intention of deepening my understanding of high performance systems.

Research is not a title I claim yet — it's a direction I'm deliberately moving toward. A Master's, and eventually a PhD, are part of that path.

Long-term, I want to teach.

I want to be the lecturer I wished for, by connecting theory to lived reality — showing how simple tools like coding can solve problems in villages, governments, and societies, starting from where people actually are.