About our guest:

Eromosele David Akhigbe is a Developer Advocate at StepSecurity, where he combines technical expertise with a passion for making technology more accessible and understandable. He’s also an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry community. A proud first-class graduate of Mechanical Engineering from Landmark University and a Decagon-trained software engineer, Eromosele is a strong advocate for open-source software and is committed to projects that democratize access to tech.

He believes deeply in Africa’s potential to shape the future of technology and innovation. Outside of work, you’ll often find him playing lead guitar or engaging with communities that share his mission to uplift the African tech ecosystem.

Find our guest on:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• Outreachy
• Juraci Paixão Kröhling on Geeking Out
• Yuri Oliveira
• Adriana's blog posts on OpenTelemetry
• Henrik Rexed - IsItObservable
• Sematext
• VSCode: Convert Tabs to Spaces
• Adriana's KubeCon talk on the Target Allocator
• Eromosele's blog post on the OpenTelemetry Demo
• Marino Wijay on Geeking Out
• SIG Boba
• Contributing to OpenTelemetry
• KCD Ghana 2024
• KCD Nigeria 2022
• Apply to Outreachy
• OCaml
• Wikimedia

Transcript:
ADRIANA:
Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Eromosele Akhigbe. Welcome, Eromosele!

EROMOSELE:
Thank you Adriana for this opportunity. It's so nice to be here.

ADRIANA:
And I'm so happy to have you on.

EROMOSELE:
Thank you so much, Adriana.

ADRIANA:
Okay. So, where are you calling from today?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, I'm calling from Lagos, Nigeria. So Nigeria, for some of you that don't know, is in Africa, is located at the western part of Africa. So yeah, that's what I'm calling from.

ADRIANA:
That's so cool. That's awesome. It's interesting. I've had, two people from Morocco on my podcast, but when I had them, they weren't in Morocco. So you are my first, like, person from Africa who's living in Africa, on the podcast. This is super exciting. Okay, so, I have so much to get into. But before we do that, we are going to start with the icebreaker questions. Are you ready? Okay. First question. Are you left handed or right handed?

EROMOSELE:
Right. Right handed.

ADRIANA:
Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

EROMOSELE:
iPhone any

ADRIANA:
Okay. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

EROMOSELE:
Mac. I'm currently using a Mac. No to Windows. I do not like Windows. Yeah. I'm a Mac user.

ADRIANA:
Did you. Okay, here's a question for you. Did you ever use Windows before? Because it's funny, I've talked to some people who are like, I've never even used Windows. I'm a Mac user through and through.

EROMOSELE:
No, I used to use like, Windows, when I started my tech career. And, it was the experience wasn't the best.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I, I also for, for listeners of the podcast, they probably know... they've heard me talk about this many times, but also like I started my life with Windows, my tech life. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?

EROMOSELE:
Yes, I do, and it's Golang. And I also have a not so favorite programing language, although, you did not ask, which is, Java I'm not a fan of Java. I'm not I'm not a crazy fan of Java because of my experience. So my, my, my experience with Java was, the first programing language because, I, I was always, intrigued by programing since I was in secondary school. So I was intrigued, but I didn't have the, you know, the resource to learn at that time. So I was still my dad. And then one time he brought one IT guy from his company, and the guy came. And I think that after learning how to use the terminal, you know, and I learned how to change password using admin, you know, I learned about admin stuff. I was a very curious kid. So, you know, and I told the guy that I can hack your laptop, and the guy didn't believe because he was an IT professional. And I'm a young kid.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.

EROMOSELE:
And he was like, I dare you to. And I did it. And he was shocked. I told him that okay, I'm really interested in programing. I would like to learn. And I think I believe strongly that it's because of what I did. Because I embarrassed him. He decided that the best language is for me to start with was Java. He gave me I would say the worst tutorials I've ever, you know watched and I you know trying it. I thought I was just a dumb person. I couldn't just like because how willing just to type hello world public main static. It sounded so scary and crazy to me. So, you know, I just decided that maybe programing wasn't my thing. When. When I had my friends talk about JavaScript, I was like, wait. If Java is this hard, this script of Java. So I just ran away from programing, you know,

ADRIANA:
Oh, wow. So that turned you off initially?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, yeah. For like, four years.

ADRIANA:
Can you imagine if you’d been like completely put off by it. Like how? Like how different your life would have been? How did you end up learning Go?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. So très interesting story. Yeah, so in 2022 I was in my because in my I was in uni... I was in uni and we're having like some kind of internship. By the way, I studied mechanical engineering. So I didn't study software engineering at all because I ran away from code. I was scared of code.

ADRIANA:
So yeah, dude. I like ran away from code in university too. I was like, I don't want to do this for a living. And then like in university, they fricking teach you how to code. And you're like, dammit!

EROMOSELE:
Yeah.

ADRIANA:
My degree is in industrial engineering. So I don't I don't have a computer science or computer engineering degree either. So there you go anyway. Carry on.

EROMOSELE:
So, we had an internship, and during that time I had a really good friend of mine shout out to him, by the way, his name is Isaac. And, you know, he just encouraged me that, okay. You don't want to program. Why not try DevOps, you know, and. Okay. DevOps. You know that. Okay. Sounds cool. Let me try it. Let me give it a try. And during that time I started learning DevOps. But the, the school I went to guess what decided teaching us JavaScript first. And I was like what. I'm back to programing again And I was so scared at first. But then I now realize that, wait a second, it's not that deep, you know? It's actually easy. It's not hard, you know, to code. And I'll say, like my passion for coding, you know, started, you know, dreaming again. But then I just because I went for my final year and I couldn't balance programing and final year projects, you know, things like that. So I had to put a pause. Yeah. And then December 2023, I decided to pick it up again, you know, instead of learning DevOps. And good was really nice course from... I can’t pronounce his name, but Abhishek, something like that. He's a really good guy, Udemy, then the life, my choice. My turning point was Outreachy. I don't know if you heard about Outreachy Adriana.

ADRIANA:
I have, I have, but for folks who aren't familiar with it, tell tell. Them tell our audience about Outreachy, yeah.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, definitely. So Outreachy basically, it's like an initiative to encourage people that are in underrepresented communities, you know, to get into open source and open science. So it's not just for tech guys, also for, you know, science people. Like we have some projects about biomes, y