In the humid swirl of a Lagos roadside suya joint in the mid-90s, a young boy hunched over a handheld Donkey Kong Jr., lost in a pixelated chase for high scores.
Nobody passing by would have guessed that this simple obsession, a plastic console blinking under a smoky night sky, would shape one of the continent’s quietest but most influential mobile engineers.
Samson Akisanya didn’t start in computer science. He was on track for bricks and beams, drawing design sheets for buildings under the hot University of Jos sun. But like many of Nigeria’s improbable tech stories, his journey zigzagged through dead dial-up servers, chalk-and-talk programming lectures, and a stubborn curiosity that refused to be boxed in by where he found himself.
“Lagos gave me Donkey Kong. Jos gave me dial-up that barely dialed up,” Akisanya says.
A Quiet Revolution in Slow Motion
Long before “software developer” became the flex title it is today, young Samson’s first computer was borrowed: a battered laptop lugged in by his brother-in-law, then a programmer at the United States Embassy on Victoria Island. In between stolen minutes on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and thumbing through Popular Science articles on satellites and modems, a simple spark lit up: tech wasn’t magic, it was makeable.
But in late-90s Nigeria, access was as scarce as bandwidth. The University of Jos, where he studied Building, that curious branch where civil engineering, architecture, and hands-on site work meet, had just opened its first computer lab. Email travelled on local servers that hitched rides to Ibadan once a week. Programming lectures? Delivered on a chalkboard to a packed room of sweaty students who had never laid fingers on a keyboard.
“We called it blackboard coding, absurd but weirdly formative. You learned to imagine code before you ever ran it,” Akisanya says.
A Detour to the Real World
His first attempts at coding were equal parts ambition and adolescent bravado. Somewhere between wooing a girl with a QBasic manual and untangling dBase syntax that read like encrypted Greek, the plan fizzled, romance and programming both stalled out. He shelved the idea and stuck to building calculations and site plans, until the United Kingdom called.
In 2000, Akisanya’s father handed him his first real machine: a Compaq, humming along at 800MHz with a princely 8MB of RAM. It wasn’t just a computer, it was an open door. Hardware tinkering led to Pascal, then C, then Java. Unlike chalkboard lectures, this was tactile, alive, bugs and fixes you could see unfold under your fingertips.
From Donkey Kong to Kotlin
Two decades on, that same kid chasing a Donkey Kong high score now shapes the backbone of mobile platforms that millions tap daily without ever knowing his name.
His fingerprints run through native Android builds, clean Swift implementations, and increasingly, the promise of Kotlin Multiplatform, an elegant answer to mobile’s old fragmentation problem. For companies staring down the barrel of bloated legacy code, Akisanya became the guy who didn’t just patch cracks; he rebuilt the entire foundation.
A former team lead at a Berlin fintech puts it simply: “Samson doesn’t just build apps. He designs systems that stay elegant when scale would break lesser code.”
His niche work in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is perhaps his most invisible yet impactful mark. From wearables and health trackers to smart logistics, Akisanya’s tiny packets of energy-efficient code keep devices talking to phones with minimum drain and maximum trust.
“He helped us build a BLE stack that extended battery life by weeks,” says one Nairobi-based product lead. “That made our device feasible – full stop.”
The Lagos Engineer Who Stays Quietly Loud
Today, Akisanya splits his time consulting for early-stage startups across Europe and Africa, and mentoring young developers who remind him of that boy at the suya stall, peering into a glitchy laptop with no clue how far a few lines of code might go.
He isn’t chasing headlines or standing on conference stages. His influence lives upstream: in PRs, in clean system architecture, in the quiet discipline of making tech work where it matters, under the hood, at scale, without fuss.
In a global industry that often favours noise over nuance, Samson Akisanya remains an outlier, the Lagos kid who crossed continents and built a career on the conviction that sometimes the best code is the code nobody ever notices.
One cross-platform system at a time.
