Eniola is not like other developers.
Not only because he loves debugging (yep, he really does) but also because at the ripe age of 17, he has already achieved so much. His success story is truly inspiring.
- He’s been coding since age 12
- Got a job in tech right out of high school
- Completed the HNGi8 as a two-time finalist
- Built hundreds of apps and projects
- Is a self-taught developer
- Started a community called GenzTechies
- Ranks Top 1-2% of all developers on CodersRank
Eniola learned coding from his church where they offered regular training and mentorship. Then COVID hit, but it did not stop him from learning on his own.
He registered on CodersRank because he thought it was a nice platform to showcase his experience (which was WAY more than you’d expect any other 17-year-old to have). At the time of signup, he landed in the Top 5% of all developers on CodersRank.
He thought this was a cool achievement but never imagined that it would lead to anything but bragging rights.
Not long after, he got his first job offer via the platform!
Eniola’s story is a great example of just how impactful CodersRank can be. It not only provides companies with the best developers but also helps devs who HAVE the experience necessary but struggle to find their dream job.
We were honored to sit down with him for a chat!
Tune in for an interview with 17-year-old developer & CodersRank alum, Eniola
In this quick sit-down, we talked about:
- How he got started learning software develoment
- His preferences for front-end vs back-end
- How he found his first developer job via CodersRank
- His vision for his community
- Thoughts about his future
+ he’ll reveal what his Ultimate Dream Job is!
Prefer to read? Jump to the video transcript ››
Show notes:
Eniola’s CodersRank profile
Eniola Osabiya’s website
Eniola’s LinkedIn
Eniola’s community, GenzTechies
What is CodersRank for developers?
CodersRank is a platform built by developers for developers. We get your frustration about spammy practices and time-wasting interviews. We are aiming to connect you with recruiters/companies who are ready to embrace experience-based evaluation.
+ Even if you’re not open to new opportunities right now, you can use CodersRank to monitor your progress as a professional. Check out our awesome skill charts and other widgets or additional ways you can use CodersRank.
Create your developer profile now ››
What is CodersRank for recruiters?
According to our 2021 developer survey, 64% of developers get offers for the wrong job. You can simplify your interview processes and review developers’ experience instead of their test results. CodersRank provides you the platform for this.
Here, developers create their profiles by providing their real experience (via repositories) and combining it with their digital footprint. This gives you a code-based evaluation you can trust.
Transcript:
Adrienn: Hi, thank you so much for hopping on the call. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? Like how old you are, what you’re doing and how you got started.
Eniola: Okay. My name is Eniola Osabiya and I am 17. I am a full stack web developer and a cloud engineer. And with five years of building experience, I started coding when I was 12.
So yeah, that’s, a basic sort of description about me.
Adrienn: Yeah. You know, when you hear “age 17” and full-stack developer [in the same sentence], how does that happen?
Eniola: I started my path from basic front-end then I tapped into like backend. I did a bit of cloud engineering stuff, like deploying applications to like AWS and stuff.
But yeah, I basically due to my background now I went to the backend. At same time, I still like work with front-end technologies. So yeah.
Adrienn: But you like back end more, right?
Eniola: Yeah, I like back-end!
Adrienn: What languages?
Eniola: Okay. PHP, node, GS, and yeah, those are my two majors, but like, I’ve taken like crash courses on Python or Java, but like, I haven’t built stuffs with it, so I won’t really call it something I’m good at yet.
Adrienn: Right. Wow. That’s impressive. And you got started when you were twelve, right? With your your church. What was that like?
Eniola: Okay. So it was actually very, very cool you know. It started as a three-day bootcamp training just to like get started. With HTML and CSS and stuff.
And we built a project which was a library management system. That was one of my first projects ever. Everything really turned out well for the three days, then we decided to become a group. After we became a group we were building projects consistently for like the stack social good, or for the church… We built an attendance management system.
We built a CBT, kind of a quiz system, and so many other things like that. At the same time, while we were in a group building projects, we were also teaching new members of the church. We did this consistently for about three years. Due to the COVID we had to stop.
So that was what really destabilized us. But you know, searching was really fun.
Adrienn: That’s awesome. So do you find that once you started really getting into it did it really take up much of your free time to learn coding?
Eniola: I don’t think I had free time because every of my free time was like, I was arguing with my sister and we spent a lot of late nights because I was in school.
I just actually finished school, high school. In most of my free time, even at school, at home, it was just me coding. And my friends were telling me that you, you going to marry a laptop and stuff.
Adrienn: Sounds familiar. Yeah, that’s awesome. And then, you recently got a job or more than one?
Eniola: Yeah. So you know, I had my CodersRank profile built way back, like maybe like two years ago. I just updated it and filled in all my profiles on it. I was excited because I was able to see myself placed in the rank of developers, across all over the world and even in my country.
So it was just like, oh yeah. I mean, I know part of Turo. So the first job didn’t come in until a couple of months back, like six months or less. And I got a reach out from Csaba, a recruiter, kind of. So he actually had the blockchain projects to offer, but I wasn’t actually fit for it. So I kind of declined the job and he was like, oh, okay.
Very good. Thanks for like giving your honest answer and stuff. And I was like, all right, sure. I mean, if I was in pain because I just lost the job like that, but at the same time, it’s something where I’m not a blockchain expert in building stuff like that. So, you know, I just had to let it go. So fast forward…
A week or days later I connected with him on LinkedIn. Then, when he accepted my connect, then he sent a project and he was like, would you like to work on this? And I was like, okay, awesome. Like, very interested. Like, I didn’t even know he was still having another project in mind for me! Then we started chatting.
Things started picking up the pace. You know, where they want to communicate, such as Slack, WhatsApp. And I was like, okay. Cause I have like other workspaces I am on. And I was like, okay., I’m very familiar with Slack and it’s always open on my laptop.
So we started Slack. We jumped in there and I started the negotiation and yeah, that was, very, very fast and, you know, very easy, amazing.
Adrienn: You’re like Top 1% now on CodersRank. Aren’t you?
Yeah, that’s right.
Adrienn: Wow. Congrats! That’s amazing. So now you have some other side projects, as well?
Eniola: Yeah, I pick up like once in a while, people reach out for like gigs and stuff. So yeah, I do have once in a while.
Adrienn: Yeah. And like most developers, you also have side side projects that you’re building for yourself, as well?
Eniola: Okay. Yeah. I’m actually building something personally which is frelapay. I have a person I’m buried in with yeah. So frelapay is one of the exciting projects that I think I’m working on, like as a site.
Adrienn: That sounds really nice. Yeah. Awesome. You’re you have your plate full there for sure.
And now you have a community that you started.
Eniola: So, GenZtech is you know… Over the years where I’ve been like in the tech space and stuff. I mean… There isn’t a very, very supportive community I’ve seen for like teenagers, like my age group to be able to really network.
And, you know, if one collaborates a few stops together, even just gauge their advice there, I mean, you definitely see couple of people, but maybe they’re just on Twitter and stuff like that. Or like LinkedIn. And then you should be able to really communicate with this type of people. I was already like, I did some internship programs, so I was able to like connect with a couple of very good devs.
So I was just like, okay, no worries. I was just going to start this as a WhatsApp group. And then I just started everybody in a group, like my close friends. I saw that, okay, these guys like were good in the tech space and stuff. We started that and you know, for six months down the line, we didn’t actually do much. It was just like a chilled environment where we’re just going to chat, maybe rant about tech topics or talk about news stories, like new technologies, maybe blockchain and stuff like that.
And, you know, talking about like possibilities, worst case scenarios and stuff like that. We started adding a couple of new people. Some people in the group would be like, oh, I think I missed somebody out. And of course when I meet new people too, they are very inspiring and young and within the age group, like 20 below, I also add them to the group.
So we started growing and we’re like 25. Then we’re like out in the world. Things are getting really exciting. Why don’t we make this a community kind of thing? So that was really just the kickstarter. And this all started less than two months ago. And yeah, we just, we decided to do that. We did our website.
And we’ve just been going from there. We created our social media accounts and we’ve had a lot of engagements. Our LinkedIn post impressions alone were like 22K when I checked last. And this was just like within two months. So it’s really been amazing. And then, yeah, we really planned on getting all the Gen Z techies in Nigeria to come on board. I have a very close relationship with every other person.
Adrienn: Right then that’s so nice. That’s, that’s amazing. So it’s mostly for other developers or just for techies in general?
Eniola: So techiech in general, the software-kind. I mean, at the same time while looking at also bringing people in from maybe the outer space, like robotics and maybe VR and stuff there. But right now it’s more like software type of guys like designers, product managers.
You know, technical people front end guys, backend guys, user experience designers… That’s the majority people we have on the group on the team right now. Then we also have dev ops engineers. We need an engineering team. We have them right now in the group.
Adrienn: That’s an awesome initiative to really… you’re giving back to the community this way and keeping the community together.
So, and that’s really, really nice. What’s your vision? Where will this go?
Eniola: I mean, one of our visions is that we want to be able to have a community and post stuff. Every techie you see, maybe creating a very awesome project out there and is young within our age group to be part of the GenZtechies.
That’s like the long-term goal. We want to like really foster the adoption of GenZtechies. It should be accepted in the tech space because this is a common problem. GenZtech faces here in my demographic in Nigeria. Which is like, you know, they are not easily able to like take up a job. Maybe because they look at them as they’re young. And I mean, this is, I guess, but I have very good experience from people work with like, you know, they talk about Linux sub-systems… Really, really good and very, very impressive. And they don’t see all of these. They just be like, okay, you’re young. You know. They just look down on them and stuff.
And it’s very sad. So we really want to be able to change that mindset. We do this by trying to hype whatever the community members are doing and making people to know that okay, they are actually here in Nigeria, and then they can build this very, very amazing stuff.
Age is not a factor to undermine them and stuff like that. So that is really what we were planning on trying to do and trying to change.
Adrienn: Wow. That’s awesome. That’s so nice to hear. Really. You’re obviously a very ambitious young man. So who knows where you’ll end up.
I’m really, really curious to see. Yeah, absolutely, you’re on the right path. And speaking of path, where do you see yourself down the road in the future? Do you think you will want to have your own company someday or do you prefer being part of a big company?
Eniola: One of my favorite places… I want to be a software engineer at Google. Well, I think I really want to get into Google. I just want to get into Google. But lately, I don’t know whether my perspective has been changing a bit.
But I think, I still want to get into Google because you know, building startups and having your own thing is also very interesting and to go through the whole thing of the entrepreneurship thing. And I love entrepreneurship, so yeah. But like, I still really want to, I mean, at some point I’m still wanting to get in to Google.
I just like the Google ecosystem and really out to get it. So I would like to be part of that at some point.
Adrienn: That’s awesome then you will. I have a good feeling.
That’s awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. I don’t wanna take too much of your time and thank you for hopping on this call and sharing your story. This is awesome. And thanks again!
Eniola: Thank you for having me on board.
Adrienn: Thank you.
Are you a developer? Get a free CodersRank account!
In this blog post, you got to know the inspiring success story of Eniola Osabiya. We are extremely proud of his accomplishments and we are positive that he will achieve even more in the future.
If you’re a developer reading this, make sure to sign up for a free CodersRank account. Through your profile, you could get a true, aggregated overview of your past work and even find your dream job.
CodersRank has vowed to make tech hiring different. Help us make hiring easier, faster, less stressful, and more experience-based.
PS: Even if you’re not currently looking for a job, CodersRank is an awesome tool to track your progress as a programmer. Yes, you can set yourself as “not available for hire,” too!
