DEV Community: Kelechi Divine

Hey startups! I build beautiful Flutter widgets and backend APIs.I am the creator of Word_Colorizer (Flutter package), Easy_Carousel (Flutter package), and zipDemon (a VS Code extension that uses LLM to generate explicit documentation). Let me build yours.

Kelechi Divine — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:55:07 +0000

How Technology Will Destroy the Future of Africa Going Forward.

Kelechi Divine — Thu, 23 May 2024 20:41:53 +0000

INTRODUCTION

It happened around 2022 when Nonso Okoroafor had a Twitter space where he invited people to discuss how technology will destroy Africa in the coming years. Fortunately, I was in space, and listening to people talk about how technology will destroy Africa is… not good for us here in Africa is why I am writing this article to call our attention to many important things we’ve ignored over the years.

In our current world today, Africa is the only continent that is lagging in everything. A friend of mine said Africa is behind what is behind the world; There are several reasons why that is happening. Trade infrastructure, weak connectivity, and knowledge ecosystems, among others, are just a few of the shortcomings as to why Africa is lagging behind the world regarding technology.

The “First” Technologies in Africa
Africa has a long history of technological innovation and ingenuity, with many ancient civilizations developing their technologies. Here are a few examples of early technologies in Africa:

1: Ancient Egyptian Technology: Ancient Egypt is renowned for its advanced technologies, including architecture, engineering, and medicine. The construction of the pyramids, the use of hieroglyphic writing, and advancements in medicine are notable achievements.

2: Nubian Technology: The Kingdom of Kush, located in what is now Sudan, was known for its ironworking skills. The Nubians were skilled blacksmiths and produced iron tools and weapons.

3: Carved Stone Structures: In various regions of Africa, ancient peoples created intricate stone structures. For example, the Great Zimbabwe ruins in Southern Africa are a testament to advanced stone masonry.

4: African Metallurgy: Iron smelting and forging were practised in Africa for centuries. The Bantu-speaking people, for instance, had knowledge of ironworking and agricultural practices that contributed to their successful migration across the continent.

## Chapter 1: Understanding the Challenges

Introduction:
Figuring out what went wrong despite technological progress is a complicated task. It means looking at the history, politics, economy, and society of different places. One significant factor is the impact of colonialism on Africa.

Colonialism in Africa:
Resource Exploitation: European powers took a lot from Africa, like minerals, timber, and crops, without considering how it might affect the environment or the people living there.

Economic Dependency: Colonial economies were set up to benefit the colonizers, not the local people. African countries became dependent on selling raw materials, and their economies were made to fit the needs of the colonial powers instead of helping the local communities grow.

## Chapter 2: The Japa Syndrome and How It Affects Tech in Africa

Introduction:
The Japa Syndrome, where skilled people leave Africa for better opportunities abroad, is mostly because of tough economic situations. This chapter looks at how this affects the tech industry, especially in countries like Nigeria.

Economic Challenges: Africa faces ongoing economic issues, like high unemployment and needing more access to good education and healthcare. This makes many Africans look for better chances outside their home countries.

What It Means for Tech: The Japa Syndrome has big effects on the tech industry:

Losing Skilled People: Skilled workers, like software engineers, are crucial for the local tech industry when they leave, there’s a direct loss of talent, and we might not have enough experts in important areas and this weakens the local tech workforce.
Less Innovation: Skilled workers drive new ideas and creations in tech If they leave, local tech industries might struggle to come up with new things and compete globally. Some people might not trust products made in Africa because they think we’re not as good at it.
Trust in Local Tech: Many Africans don’t trust products made by other Africans. They believe that better expertise and ideas are found outside the continent. Rebuilding trust in local tech is crucial for the tech industry in Africa to grow.

Chapter 3: Pursuit of Wealth Over Innovation

Introduction:
In the world of software engineering, there’s a new trend where some engineers are more interested in making money than coming up with new and creative solutions. This chapter explores the challenges that arise when financial gains become more important than innovation.

Money Comes First: Lately, many software engineers are choosing jobs based on how much money they can make, rather than focusing on creating new and interesting things. This shift raises concerns about how it might affect the future of the tech industry.

Short-Term Money vs. Long-Term Creativity: Engineers, tempted by high-paying jobs, might go for roles that promise quick money. However, this focus on short-term gains could mean they’re not spending enough time on projects that could bring about long-term innovation.

Impact on Technology: When engineers care more about money than making innovative things, it can slow down the progress of technology. The tech world needs creativity and problem-solving, and if everyone is only thinking about profits, it could hold back the development of cool new solutions.

Companies and Incentives: The culture and rewards provided by companies play a big role. If companies care more about making money than encouraging creativity, engineers might just follow what their employers want.

PS: You might want to read the full article on what made Patricia quit the operation here_

## How to Deal with the Challenge:
To get software engineers back to a balance between making money and being creative, it’s important to:

Encourage Creativity: African tech companies should create an environment that values and rewards creativity, so engineers feel excited to work on new and interesting projects. Tech companies in Silicon Valley, known for valuing innovation, provide employees with creative spaces and time for personal projects.
Invest in Research: Tech companies should spend resources on research and development. This gives engineers a chance to work on projects that could be both financially successful and innovative. Tech giants like Google allocate significant resources to R&D, encouraging engineers to explore new ideas and contribute to cutting-edge projects and this is why we have many projects built by Google engineers like, Gmail, YouTube, Google Chrome, Google Maps, Google Meet and so many more
Teach Innovation: Education should focus on why innovation and problem-solving are crucial. This helps shape the way future engineers think about their work. Renowned universities, such as MIT and Stanford, emphasize innovation in their computer science programs, instilling a mindset that values creative problem-solving.

## Chapter 4: Taking Shortcuts in Software Engineering Education

Introduction:

In the high-speed world of software engineering, some people choose quick employment over thorough learning. This chapter explores the outcomes of this shortcut approach, leading to the development of what we might call “half-baked” software engineers.

Choosing Work Over Learning: Many aspiring software engineers now prioritize immediate job opportunities over investing time in comprehensive learning. This shortcut mentality raises concerns about the depth of knowledge and skills these engineers bring to the field.

Implications of Skipping Learning:

Incomplete Skill Set: Engineers who rush into jobs may lack a full understanding of the crucial principles and advanced concepts in software development.
Limited Problem-Solving Abilities: Quick employment seekers might struggle with complex problem-solving since they may not have delved deeply into the theoretical aspects of software engineering. This is why, some African tech companies, often have to hire developers from Asia or Europe to fix broken systems.
Reduced Innovation Potential: Skipping learning can stifle creativity, limiting the potential for innovative thinking and leading to the failure of tech startups in Africa after just a few years in the market.

Industry Impact:

Quality of Products: Software products developed by engineers with incomplete training may suffer from lower quality, leading to potential issues and bugs.
Stagnation in Advancements: A workforce that values quick employment over learning may contribute to a stagnant tech industry, hindering progress and innovation.

Addressing the Issue:

Promoting Continuous Learning: Encouraging a culture of ongoing learning within the industry can discourage the tendency to prioritize immediate employment over thorough education. Tech companies should establish in-house educational programs, teaching software engineers Data Structures and Algorithms, Software Engineering, and more.
Mentorship Programs: Creating mentorship programs enables experienced professionals to guide newcomers, emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and skill development.
Industry Standards and Certification: Implementing and recognizing industry standards and certifications can motivate engineers to complete comprehensive training before entering the workforce, ensuring a more competent and skilled pool of professionals.

## Conclusion: Facing Challenges in Africa’s Tech Journey Looking at how technology is shaping Africa’s future, some concerns need attention. From losing talented individuals to the risk of prioritizing money over innovation, these challenges could impact the continent’s tech growth.

As Africa steps into the tech era, it’s important to tackle these challenges head-on. Balancing the positive aspects of technology while addressing the risks is key to ensuring a future where technology supports Africa’s development instead of posing threats to its progress.

NOTICE:
Join me on Medium or Dev.to for insightful discussions on software engineering, Java, and other tech topics. Your support means a lot. Let’s start this journey together cause I know if you, my stories can go across the world.

Finally, if you love my work and would like to support me, you can also buy me a coffee here. Thank you!

Epic Facebook Failure

Kelechi Divine — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 03:20:16 +0000

Facebook, is the social network everyone loves to hate. Or hates to love. The relationship between Facebook and its users has always been tricky, due partly to many users' utter dependence on the site for communication and social interaction.

Facebook has been the major social network that connects people from all over the world and all parts of your life. There are a lot of great things Facebook offers:
The chance to reconnect with old friends, share your photos, list your likes, join interest groups, and more.

Despite the many wonders the social network offers, I felt that Facebook, boasting approximately 800 million active users and an estimated $4.27 billion in annual revenue, was overdue for a critique. When Facebook released their iPad social utility app in October 2011, which many considered a disappointing failure of an application, I decided it was time to file a list of Facebook failure grievances.

Wall Of Shame:

There have been some epic Facebook failures during the long journey from Mark Zuckerberg's pet project to the social media giant. Some Facebook failure moments include:

Ongoing privacy concerns and backlash: Facebook faces
continuing criticism for non-transparent, user-unfriendly privacy policy changes. Facebook changes its privacy policies regularly, with default settings that force users to share more profile information, photos, contact information, and personal details than they would normally like.
Facebook Lite: This was supposed to be an alternative to the normal bandwidth-hungry Facebook for users on slower networks, but this Facebook fail disappeared after eight months.
Facebook FBML: FBML was a markup language Facebook fail, in which Facebook developers attempted to make their own version of HTML that would enable a company to create a custom landing page for their Facebook company page.
Facebook Gifts: With Facebook Gifts, users had the opportunity to give silly little picture gifts to friends. They were fun and cute for a while until Facebook started to expect people to pay $2 (which is about 863 in Nigeria's naira) to send a thumbnail image of a dog in a birthday hat.
Facebook Message: The 2012 launch of Facebook Message enabled users to send and receive Facebook messages with an @facebook email address. While people still use Facebook messages, it didn't eliminate Gmail or revolutionize message sharing the way some predicted it might.

The Main Problem

In October of last year, Kevin Roose wrote a column titled, "Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew." His hook was a series of stories in The Wall Street Journal, based on internal company documents, which revealed the company's failure to stop content that damaged teen mental health, spread vaccine misinformation and more. In this story, I'll lay out the four biggest problems facing the company.

1: The age problem

If you have children, you've probably noticed that they prefer other social media platforms. To many of them, Facebook is for older people which is not exactly a recipe for growth. Helen Lewis of The Atlantic, among others, has described the platform as a "Boomerbook."
Yes, many teenagers and younger adults use Instagram, which Facebook bought a decade ago. But even Instagram has been struggling to keep up. "TikTok is absolutely eating Instagram's lunch right now, in terms of usage and cultural sway, and advertisers generally want to be where the young people are," Kevin Roose said. "Even though Meta has tried to copy TikTok's most successful features and shove them into Instagram Reels, they're limited in how much change users will accept without a fight."

The innovation problem

"The company just doesn't appear to know how to invent successful new stuff," Farhad Manjoo of Times Opinion has written. "Most of its biggest hits not just two of its main products, Instagram and WhatsApp, but many of its most used features, like Instagram Stories were invented elsewhere. They made their way to Facebook either through acquisitions or, when that didn't work, outright copying."

That's a big change from Facebook's first decade when it transformed social media. Especially important was its News Feed, which meant users no longer had to spend time searching out other accounts to know what people were posting. Since the company went public in 2012, it has been much less innovative.

The metaverse problem

Zuckerberg feels so strongly that the metaverse based around the world of virtual reality, or VR represents the future of the internet that he renamed the company after it.
"It's been almost a year since Facebook rebranded itself Meta and announced its big push into the metaverse, and there aren't a lot of big, obvious wins to show for it," Kevin Roose said. "VR is still pretty niche, and it's not clear how much usage apps like Horizon Worlds are getting. (Although, if any Meta employees are reading this, I would love to know!)"
When Zuckerberg **unveiled parts of the company's platform earlier this year, critics mocked it as looking dated. He responded by acknowledging it was "pretty basic" and promised "major updates**" soon.

The antitrust problem

Some "Meta supporters" argue that the company's recent struggles prove that it isn't the omnipotent force that its critics claim and that the federal government should go easy on it. But I think that claim misses what's really going on.
The company has become less dominant partly because both the Trump and Biden administrations have taken a tougher stance toward mergers.
"If Mark Zuckerberg could acquire his way out of this problem, as he did by buying Instagram back in 2012, he absolutely would," Kevin Ross said. "But regulators, at least under this administration, aren't going to let him."
Depending on your point of view, it's either ironic or fitting. As Kevin said, "Facebook became so dominant, in part by acting in anticompetitive ways for so many years, that Meta is losing its dominance as a result."

The bottom line: Facebook remains among the world's most powerful companies, with the ability to influence elections, public health and much more. It also continues to produce huge amounts of revenue, which will allow it many chances to create successful new products. But its struggles are real, and they don't show any sign of disappearing.

One positive sign for the company: It has sold more than 10 million of its VR headsets, which may suggest the niche is growing. But it remains unclear whether VR has anywhere near the mass-market appeal that social media does.

Thank you for reading. zip it now!

Basic Java Knowledge.

Kelechi Divine — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 23:29:03 +0000

Even the king of Java had to read to understand what OOP really means.

As the name suggests, > Object-Oriented Programming
or OOPs refers to languages that use objects in programming, they use objects as a primary source to implement what is to happen in the code. Objects are seen by the viewer or user, performing tasks assigned by you. Object-oriented programming aims to implement real-world entities like inheritance, hiding, polymorphism etc. in programming. The main aim of OOP is to bind together the data and the functions that operate on them so that no other part of the code can access this data except that function. I believe you understand how to declare a method in Java and have a full understanding of the types of methods that Java has.

For example, a dog is an object because it has states like colour, name, breed, etc. as well as behaviours like wagging the tail, barking, eating, etc.

Concepts of Object Oriented Programming

Class: The collection of objects is called class. It is a logical entity. A class can also be defined as a blueprint from which you can create an individual object. “Class doesn’t consume any space”.

public class Practice {

}

Inheritance: When one object acquires all the properties and behaviours of a parent object, it is known as inheritance. It provides code reusability. It is used to achieve runtime polymorphism. For example, Nigeria is a Parent Object; Lagos, Imo and Ogun states are all inheriting from the parent object.
Polymorphism: If one task is performed in different ways, it is known as polymorphism. In Java, we use method overloading and method overriding to achieve polymorphism.

public class Animal {

    private String name;

    private String color;

    private int age;

    public Animal(String name, String color, int age){
       this.name = name;
       this.color = color;
       this.age = age;
    }

    public Animal(String name, int age){
       this.name = name;
       this.age = age;
    }

Abstraction: Hiding internal details and showing functionality is known as abstraction. In Java, we use abstract class and interface to achieve abstraction.

public abstract class Animal {

   private Heart heart;

   private Lungs lungs;

   private Kidney kidney;

Encapsulation: Binding (or wrapping) code and data together into a single unit are known as encapsulation. For example, a capsule is wrapped with different medicines. A java class is an example of encapsulation. Java bean is the fully encapsulated class because all the data members are private here.
Coupling: Coupling refers to the knowledge or information or dependency of another class. It arises when classes are aware of each other. If a class has the details information of another class, there is strong coupling. In Java, we use private, protected, and public modifiers to display the visibility level of a class, method, and field. You can use interfaces for the weaker coupling because there is no concrete implementation.

You can also view my medium account here

Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something. zip it now!

REST API Best Practice for Developers.

Kelechi Divine — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 22:53:15 +0000

What’s up, guys? Thank you for tuning in. I hope you will enjoy this that you are about to read. We all know that Facebook, GitHub, Google, Flutterwave, Cowrywise, Netflix, and a few other tech monsters have given a red carpet welcome to developers to exploit their data using APIs.
Today, it is becoming a trend for innovative tech platforms to elevate their platform with beautifully composed REST APIs.

The critical point here is perfectly designed REST APIs. If the REST API isn’t designed flawlessly, it can create problems for developers instead of easing the user experience. Thus, it is highly critical to use the commonly followed conventions of API design to serve the best solution to your clients or developers.

Best practice

REST API Must Accept And Respond With JSON

It is a common practice that APIs should accept JSON requests as the payload and also send responses back. JSON is an open and standardized format for data transfer. It is derived from JavaScript in a way to encode and decode JSON via the Fetch API or another HTTP client. Moreover, server-side technologies have libraries that can decode JSON without any hassle. I will show you an example of an API where JSON accepts payloads.

{
    "username" : "zipDemon",
    "phoneNumber" : "09152624528",
    "languageCode" : "en"
}

Therefore Use JSON as the Format for Sending and Receiving Data.

Always Have Error Status Codes

It is very compulsory for developers to use status codes in their REST API design. With the status codes, developers can instantly identify the issue, which reduces the time of writing parsers to address all the different types of errors. There’s a status code for everything from finding out the cause of a denied session to locating the missing resource. This will help your users to know what is going on whether the request is successful if it fails, or something else. For example

if (userService.existByEmail(user.getEmail())){
    throw new BlogException("User with that email already exist.");
}
ResponseDetails responseDetails = new ResponseDetails("successfully", HttpStatus.OK.toString());
return ResponseEntity.**status(200)**.body(responseDetails);

Name Collections with Plural Nouns

When you have to develop the collection in REST API, just go with plural nouns. It makes it easier for humans to understand the meaning of the collection without actually opening it.
If you have an endpoint like https://codegun.com/comment/198, it might be okay for deleting a post with a DELETE request or updating a post with a PUT or PATCH request, but it doesn’t tell the user that there could be some other posts in the collection. The example doesn’t clearly show whether there is more than one comment in the system or not. For a human reader, it might be challenging to understand, as well. This is why your collections should use >plural nouns. So, instead of https://codegun.com/comment/198, it should be https://codegun.com/comments/198.

Don’t Use Verbs In URLs

When you’re designing a REST API, you should not use verbs in the endpoint paths. The endpoints should use nouns, signifying what each of them does. This is because HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE are already in verb form for performing basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. There are also others such as COPY, PURGE, LINK, UNLINK, and so on.

So, for example, an endpoint should not look like this https://codegun.com/getUserComment/20. Instead, it should be something like this: https://codegun.com/comments/20

Provide Accurate API Documentation

When you make a REST API, you need to help clients (consumers) learn and figure out how to use it correctly. The best way to do this is by providing good documentation for the API.

The documentation should contain:

Relevant endpoints of the API
Example requests of the endpoints
Implementation in several programming languages
messages listed for different errors with their status codes

One of the most common tools you can use for API documentation is Postman.

It is a simple principle the faster developers understand your API, the faster they start using it.
Your API documentation must be compiled with precision.

Use Filtering, Sorting, and Pagination to Retrieve the Data Requested

Sometimes, an API’s database can get incredibly large. If this happens, retrieving data from such a database could be very slow.

Filtering, sorting, and pagination are all actions that can be performed on the collection of a REST API. This lets it only retrieve, sort, and arrange the necessary data into pages so the server doesn’t get too occupied with requests.

An example of a filtered endpoint is the one below:
https://codegun/posts?tags=java. This endpoint will fetch any post that has a tag of java.

It is important to put these best practices and conventions into practice so you can build highly functional applications that work well, are secure, and ultimately make the lives of your API consumers easier.

Thank you for reading. zip it now!

What language do you write comfortably?

Kelechi Divine — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 07:32:54 +0000