The context
My role as Software Director was not limited to maintaining a website. NACOS CUAB had student-facing processes that were still manual, ideas that needed technical ownership, and projects that required people with different levels of availability to work together.
One of the hardest parts was not finding ideas; it was finding people who were willing and able to follow through consistently. I created project teams and received help from as many as six people across the tenure, while still taking direct responsibility for critical implementation work when a project needed to move forward.
Leadership often meant knowing when to coordinate the team and when to sit down and build the missing piece myself.
What I was responsible for
I created and coordinated development teams, reviewed and refactored members’ contributions, monitored deployments, connected supporting services, and took ownership of backend delivery where the team needed it. I also had to balance technical ambition with the realities of volunteer participation, limited time, and missing operational resources such as domain names.
My work covered four major deployed systems: the NACOS CUAB website, a digital receipt system, a voting system, and a hackathon judging portal. Their repositories belong to the private NACOS CUAB organization, so the case study links only to the public deployments.
What I did
NACOS CUAB website
I worked with contributors on the association’s public website, built with React and Vite. I created the project teams, monitored deployment, reviewed and refactored members’ code, built the Teams and Gallery pages, refurbished the homepage, and connected Strapi so content could be managed outside the frontend codebase.
Digital Receipt System
Receipts had previously been handled manually. We designed a flow where a student uploads proof of transfer and provides the small amount of information required for the receipt. On the administrative side, the Financial Director reviews the submission and confirms that the payment is valid; the system then generates and sends the receipt to the student’s email.
I personally built the backend for the Digital Receipt System using Java and Spring Boot. The wider system used React, MySQL, Supabase, and S3-compatible object storage. It was deployed, but we could not obtain a domain name and did not finish early enough for the association to adopt it during my tenure. I present it as a completed technical delivery, not as an operational success.
Voting and nomination system
I built the Voting Management System end to end, using AI as a development aid. The backend used NestJS, with a React and TypeScript frontend, PostgreSQL for data, Cloudinary for media storage, and Supabase services.
The system was used for an award nomination in which about 90 students voted. Administrators imported an eligibility list supplied by the department containing each student’s name, matriculation number, and level. Eligible students received a one-time password, which allowed the system to validate access and enforce a single vote per person.
AI in Software Engineering seminar and workshop
I planned and hosted a seminar and workshop for students on artificial intelligence in software engineering and what comes next for the field. I invited Abayomi Ajao, CEO of Zulfah Group and someone whose support and example I deeply value, to speak with the students and share an industry perspective.
The event brought together roughly 100 students. Beyond inviting the speaker, I drove the planning and execution required to turn the idea into a well-attended learning event. It expanded the scope of my tenure beyond building software: part of the responsibility was also helping students understand how the profession was changing and giving them access to people already working in the industry.
NACOSCUAB Hackathon ‘26
I originated the idea for NACOSCUAB Hackathon ‘26 and served as its lead organizer, driving the planning and execution needed to turn it into a real event. It was a hybrid hackathon: teams built during a 48-hour coding session on June 6-7, 2026, followed by an in-person demo day at Crescent University on June 9.
Twelve teams registered and eight made it to demo day, where they presented to a judging panel that included industry experts from Moniepoint and Microsoft, alongside the College Dean and the Head of the Department of Computer Science. To make evaluation more structured, I built and deployed a dedicated hackathon judging portal for scoring the teams against the agreed criteria.
The top three teams received NGN450,000, NGN300,000, and NGN200,000 respectively, while every presenting team received a participation prize. The projects showed different ways students could build useful products with AI:
- EveriKobo, the winning project, turns a trader’s handwritten notebook into a verified financial identity. AI extracts records from notebook photographs, the trader verifies them, and the system calculates an EveriScore that places the trader in a risk tier. A Green tier can unlock microfinance-bank loan referrals.
- Studie, the second-place project, converts a learner’s notes or slides into practice exams. It extracts the course material, uses an LLM to generate mock questions, grades completed exams, and provides personalized feedback.
- T2B (Trade by Barter), the third-place project, is an AI-assisted skill-exchange platform. It matches freelancers who can trade services, evaluates the fairness of a proposed exchange using complexity, demand, and estimated effort, and records completed work as verified experience.
The most difficult operational problem was internet access during the event. The full behind-the-scenes story deserves its own write-up, but the experience reinforced that event infrastructure needs the same contingency planning as software infrastructure.
What it taught me
This tenure taught me that shipping software in a student organization is as much an operational and leadership problem as it is a technical one. A deployed application is not automatically an adopted application: timing, ownership, domains, approvals, and handover all affect whether people can use what was built.
It also taught me to design around the real process rather than the exciting technology. The receipt system had to respect financial approval; the voting system had to start from an authoritative eligibility list; and the website needed a content workflow that did not depend on developers for every update.
Finally, working with inconsistent volunteer participation made me more deliberate about scoping projects, reviewing contributions, documenting ownership, and stepping into implementation without overstating what I built alone versus what the team delivered together.
The hackathon taught me to dare myself more: ambitious ideas become less intimidating once they are broken into concrete people, systems, deadlines, and decisions. It made me less afraid to attempt work that initially feels too large, while remaining honest about the operational details required to make it succeed.