Hey DEV Community! 👋My name is Jesse Otobo. I’m 11 years old, and I’ve been coding for about 3 to 4 years now—ever since I was a primary school student in Primary 3.Recently, I launched my biggest project yet: Jesse Rock Math, a live, gamified multiplayer web application built to help primary and middle school students sharpen their mental arithmetic speed, accuracy, and confidence.Today, I want to share my story as a professional vibe coder, how I manage my code, a major product management decision I just made, and how I structured the app for maximum growth and discoverability.🙏 Staying Focused in My Faith My Christian faith is the absolute foundation of my life. I am always focused on my faith, and it keeps me grounded, motivated, and inspired every single day. Before I sit down to tackle a big problem or plan out a new project, my faith gives me the focus and patience I need to keep going. I believe that the talents I have are a gift, and building tools like this math app is my way of working hard, staying disciplined, and creating something positive that can help other kids succeed.⚽ Football and 11-Hour Code Sessions When I'm not focusing on my faith or working on tech, you can usually find me out on the pitch playing football—it's my absolute favourite sport. My heritage is proudly Nigerian, giving me a strong sense of drive and a global perspective on how I want to help kids learn all over the world.But when it's time to build, I lock in completely. My project documentation notes that I have a unique "engineering endurance" for my age. When a feature needs to be shipped, I can sit in complete silence and orchestrate code for 10 to 11 hours straight in a single day.🛠 My Stack & Dev Process: The Reality of "Vibe Coding"A lot of traditional developers spend months stuck in "tutorial hell"—watching videos but never launching anything. I chose a different path: theory first, then dive straight into the deep end.I'll be honest with you: I am not the best at reading raw syntax or scanning thousands of lines of dense code. But what I am great at is orchestration, architecture, and prompting. I treat AI models as my junior engineers. My skillset lies in:Understanding the core architecture and theory behind what I want to build.Explaining complex logic and workflows to AI models clearly.Debugging through natural language and guiding the model step-by-step to get the exact output required.To build Jesse Rock Math, I used Google Gemini as my primary pair programmer to write and refine the codebase, and deployed the entire multiplayer infrastructure smoothly using Vercel.💡 A Major Product Decision: Staying True to the "Rock" Theme As my app grows, I'm thinking a lot about product management. Since I love football so much, I originally thought about adding a football mode to the game.But then I realized something crucial: Not all children like football, but I love football.As a developer, you can't just build features based on your personal hobbies—you have to think about all your users. To make sure the app stays inclusive and fun for everyone, I made the executive decision to leave sports out of it and lean 100% into the high-energy Rockstar theme.To drive massive traffic and keep kids coming back, I am focused on building out a "Rock Tour" progression system, a "Battle of the Bands" multiplayer mode where classrooms can compete against each other, and unlockable avatar items like electric guitars and neon hairstyles.📈 Engineering for SEO & Discoverability To achieve my goal of getting high traffic and making the app famous among schools, I knew I had to build it to be search-engine friendly right from the start. A lot of modern Single Page Applications (SPAs) struggle with search indexing, so I engineered the app with discovery in mind:Semantic HTML Structure: I directed my AI junior developer to ensure all headers (
Jesse Otobo
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I’m an 11-Year-Old Nigerian Christian "Vibe Coder." I Shipped a Multiplayer App, and Here is My Journey.
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