I started college in Memphis in 1997 having never really used a computer. That year I discovered the internet, and I have been building ever since.
At GitHub I applied machine learning to how software gets built, co-building its first repository recommendation engine. As technical advisor to the CEO, I helped bring Copilot to market, the product that made AI part of how developers write code, and led the CEO's prototyping teams. Before that I co-led Google's computer science education portfolio and advised the Obama administration's Presidential Innovation Fellows.
In 2022 I founded Fimio, an AI infrastructure company backed by Neo, Redpoint Ventures, Protocol Labs, and The House Fund, with angels including Nat Friedman. Fimio shipped a sandboxed inference platform and a malicious smart-contract detection API. When I wound it down in 2026, I returned the remaining capital to our investors. I have given more than thirty talks, including the opening keynote at GitHub Universe and a talk at Fortune Brainstorm Tech. I hold a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Computer Science Education. I am Nigerian, from Lagos.
I think about how people learn to build things, who gets to build them, and what we are actually making when we make software.
That question matters more now that code is generated faster than anyone can read it. I am working on where understanding goes next, and my first answer is CodeStories: a codebase told as a story, pinned to real lines and checked like tests. I write about this here, speak about it, and advise founders working on the same problem. The record of what I have done and what I am working on now are both here.
Start here
If you are new to my writing, these are a good way in.
- Where Comprehension Goes: Introducing CodeStories What if we could make stories out of codebases? I did exactly that. I turned repos into CodeStories, pinned the story claims to real lines and ran them as tests. Turns out I understood the code better with a story than with docs.
- What is luxury? And what has that got to do with software? A bag in Madrid, and what it says about the code we are now generating faster than anyone can understand it.
- Winding Down Fimio Four years of building, and choosing clarity over a go-to-market motion that was not me.
- The Build Peeling back the layers of native LLM application deployments. I wrote this because I wanted to demystify the process.
- #20YearsACoder A retrospective on the first twenty years, written in 2017.
- Babasola Thomas, my Father at 80 My father was that rare breed of humanity born with a capacity to tolerate high risk.
There are forty-odd more, going back to 2012.