Exploring Tech and Sustainability: My Career Journey

As a software engineer passionate about environmental sustainability, I want to leverage technology for positive global change. My journey has equipped me with a blend of skills and experiences that I am eager to bring to solving challenges through data-driven solutions.

From Local Advocacy to Global Impact

An aspiration in my career journey is to work at the intersection of tech and sustainability, particularly environmental sustainability. To do work that directly impacts humanitarian development. This passion stems from insights I have gotten from my little advocacy experience. In my community, people show a lackadaisical behaviour towards the surroundings, for example, improper waste management is commonplace, so I educate people to be environmentally conscious through data-backed advocacy. Data-backed advocacy means that I do extensive research about the effects that we suffer from climate issues and use that to make stories to enlighten them. I realised that people tend to be more responsive when they hear how much negative impact they can cause than when we say stop without helping them see why. This led me to research the fields of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. I'm particularly interested in how these technologies can be harnessed to address the mounting environmental challenges in my community and country.

Impactful Projects and Experience

From an ambitious first project in 2022: my attempt to track the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) progress in my home country, Nigeria, where data scarcity poses significant challenges. I innovatively leveraged Wikipedia articles about various locations in Nigeria to assess their livability. This project provided invaluable hands-on experience in several key areas of data science and artificial intelligence, including Wikipedia extraction through XML parsing), Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning classification and sentiment analysis.

This experience stayed with me as I went to work for a short while in the field of tech consulting at an organisation where I contributed my skills to providing businesses with technological solutions. The turning point to contribute and stay committed to a cause of greater good came with my Outreachy internship at Humanitarian OpenStreet Map Team (HOTOSM). I experienced and contributed to projects that directly impact humanitarian development. In my time at HOTOSM, I got to contribute to fAIr - an AI-assisted mapping and see how AI can be utilised for disaster management through mapping. I am now committed to finding full-time roles in AI and sustainability.

Skills and Experience

Software Development

• Python and C#: During my time in tech consulting, I got experience in backend development. A key achievement was developing an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) application that received over 10,000+ users in the first week of its launch.

• API Development: I have experience developing and integrating API, and improving API documentation quality to fit Open-API specifications from various projects.

• Software Testing: From improving backend test cases, I have learnt to develop comprehensive test cases, boost code coverage, raising test scores significantly

• Version Control: I have hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing.

Data Science and AI

• From working on the project I mentioned earlier, I got hands-on experience in, NLP and Machine Learning for classification and sentiment analysis. I also contributed to an AI-assisted mapping project for disaster management.

Open-Source Contribution

• In my internship at HOTOSM, I actively contributed to significant Open-source projects like fAIr and Raw-Data-API.

Continuous Development

To expand my knowledge of AI, I seized the opportunity to participate in the Climate Change AI (CCAI) 2024 summer school. This allowed me to learn from seasoned experts about the diverse applications of AI in climate-related domains, such as Climate monitoring, Policy development and analysis and various other critical areas.

I am open to new opportunities and resources to learn and grow in the field of AI.

Strong Values for a Team

One of my core values is compassion. It has been a recurrent theme in my journey. I strongly believe that compassion benefits you as much as others. An example is during the Outreachy pre-selection phase - where every applicant solves the same task. A fellow contributor who was new to contributing to GitHub and contributing to any development project reached out for help. I walked the person through, explaining every step till they made their first contribution. It was a feat for me to see them understand and express their gratitude. Now it doesn't end there, after I was successfully selected for the internship and started the work on that task, I was stuck with a blocker that this person had faced back then. And to fix it, I went back to my conversation history with them where I had explained in detail how to solve that minor blocker. My compassion then came back in helpful for me! This is an asset to any team desiring to progress in quantum leaps.

I'm glad I have this and if you are hiring or know anyone who is hiring and is keen on having great assets like me in their team, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and discuss further!