It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I’ve mostly been in my notes since my last article and, well, working on a lot. Let me tell you about it.
Work at Leapfrog Technologies
At the start of last year, I joined the team at Leapfrog Technologies, the company that owns Zippy (the courier service). I loved their approach to handling deliveries during the interview sessions—it was about saving the environment, zero emissions while providing the best service. It was very different from how the other delivery services operated; most of them are just for profit and don’t take a lot into consideration. So I was happy to help them with this!
I joined and my job was to work on their mobile apps for both customers and the delivery partners. The customer app was meant to help make it easier for customers to place their orders, and the delivery partner app was for the operations team to manage deliveries and their tools for work (label printer and battery packs).
The existing app was in React Native, and that came with a few issues based on the target market—most customers would be using low-end devices, and this wasn’t something React Native was right for. I took a rewrite in a more performance-focused platform to heart, and ended up with Flutter. With good guidance from Selikem, I was able to complete a good rewrite of the existing React Native app to Flutter with full feature parity while waiting for the team’s approval, which came in later. I was also keeping new features and maintenance going for the existing apps. It was a lot of work; I got sick at a point 🥹 but I got better.
Shifting all apps to Flutter led to a 99% reduction in bugs from customers. They also enjoyed a smooth experience no matter the kind of device they were on. And from there, more features kept coming in…
I also started working on Btcinout and its Partners HQ, a platform with a vision to let anyone pay for anything anywhere using Bitcoin without bothering the merchant with Bitcoin—the merchant gets paid in the local currency. It was an awesome experiment, poking around building on Bitcoin and discovering new tools to make the development easier and faster, and I was learning a lot too.
Eight Labs and Formbase
I joined the genius team at EightLabs around mid-2024. We worked on Formbase, a tool to help anyone get rid of the technical overhead of adding a form to their website, e.g. a contact us form, and easily receive responses with notifications and integrations. It was an awesome experience with new things I learned (tRPC and working with it). I later rewrote parts of Btcinout to use tRPC for better type safety while asking Ephraim a lot of noob questions about it.
We did a lot of planning for more products which I have high hopes we would put out soon, even though we got very slow 👀.
Birthday Reflections
Then my birthday came around. I wasn’t very celebrated 😂—a lot of people forgot, and well, some were mad at me for one reason or another. It was a nice day for me though. I was proud, especially of how far I had come and what I had done so far with what I had.
I lost my laptop and my phone when the year started, due to a few issues the Internet doesn’t need to know about. I got one on instalments from Danku Laptops, which was very helpful. I was relying on a phone with a broken screen (totally blank), so I worked on Reflect, a tool to mirror the screen to the laptop and allow me to control the phone from there to answer calls, among other things.
This stopped working after a while due to bugs I couldn’t very much debug after updates, so I gave up. I couldn’t release the project for others to use because it was buggy. One thing that was unique: it was the first birthday I didn’t push code anywhere or work on anything 🙃.
End of 2024 and New Projects
The end of year for 2024 came, and we started working on a new project at EightLabs—you’ll see it soon. I also started working on Sail, a platform to help anyone in Ghana compare prices for rides and deliveries on all the popular ride-hailing services: Bolt, Uber, and Yango. It got featured in the products of the year in Ghana for 2024 wrapped and received loads of love from a lot of people.
Q1 2025: Growth and Opportunities
Then Q1 of this year came through, and everything I worked on has improved so much—I loved it. I was honoured to host a developers session for building on Fedimint and building Fedi Mods in Togo with the Fedi team. It was an awesome experience. I had an interview while there 😂—a little about that in the next paragraph.
I got to join the team at Vela Partners after I returned from Togo. The interview I just talked about was my final one. Nice country, and I got to learn a lot about it. I joined as an AI & Blockchain engineer, and work there has been awesome, very different from teams I’ve worked on before. I love everything I’m working on so much—challenging and with a lot to learn. I also got the chance to speak at the Infobip Accra tech meetup #4 on building sustainable and impact-driven startups.
Life is good for me, and I’m happy 😁. I love to help anyone around me that requires it, and it’s been a rewarding journey so far, with everything I’ve worked on looking very good. Though I promised myself to improve a lot—get a new laptop (yet to do that), a new phone (got one now, a pretty one), and change a few other personal things before the year ends. Not forgetting I didn’t put anything on my YouTube after my first intro video; that’s one of the personal things I need to address, and I’ll start sharing awesome stuff there.
Thanks for reading this. I’m Aikins and I love to build stuff.
