24 hours. That's how long a contract lasted before someone pulled it because I was running Windows, not Mac. Not my work. My OS.
It almost broke me. Not in the dramatic way. In the quiet way — the kind where you keep shipping code during the day and don't tell your family anything at night.
Then came FR8. A fully-funded, three-month residency in Helsinki for young builders. I found it in Hemapriya's Dev Opportunity Radar #2, applied the same day, got a confirmation email. A few days later: "didn't quite align with what we're currently looking for — deep technical, high-conviction bets." I took it well in the replies. Not so well internally.
The Windows contract was the lowest. Finland was close behind it.
I kept showing up for the DEV Challenges anyway. Almost every one that's run since I got back. Won OpenClaw. Lost more than I won — a lot more. Those losses did something the wins didn't: they prepared me. I'm in the Global AI Hackathon this month. And the Africa Deep Tech Challenge. I want to win one. Maybe both.
There was a third one too, closer to home than the other two: the Community Program Manager role at DEV itself. MLH had just acquired DEV and needed someone to run it. Not a writing role. Not a building role. My profile fit because of the platform depth, not despite it.
Rejected on location. Small team, no infrastructure to hire in Nigeria right now. Not my resume. Not my answers. A payroll line I couldn't fix from my side of the application.
This isn't even my original account. I had one back in 2019. Lost it. Found my way back here in November 2025 — eight months, not a year, but it's felt longer.
My family doesn't know any of this. Not the Windows call, not Finland, not the account I lost in 2019. They know I code. They don't know what coding cost this year.
DEV.to is where the people who do know are. Not because I told the whole story to anyone here. Because writing honestly and showing up did what explaining never could.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, one of those pieces — "Someone Else Pays for Your AI Access" — got picked up in AI Engineer World's Fair Daily Context, swyx's curated daily covering the World's Fair conference in San Francisco. I wrote that piece from my phone in Port Harcourt. My mom doesn't know what Daily Context is or who swyx is, or what any of this means. I still want to find a way to show her.
If you've had a stretch like this — a low point, another one right behind it, and a community that held you without needing the backstory — I see you. I feel you like we're in the same room.
Jess, Ben, the whole DEV team — thank you. You're touching lives in ways I don't think you fully know.
Here's to the next stretch being kinder. And if it isn't, here's to showing up anyway.
