I learned to program before I learned to dispense. In 2013, well before university, I took a diploma in data processing and computer programming, the kind of course you sign up for because a computer is the most interesting object in the room. Then I went to study pharmacy, which most people would read as a change of direction. It was not. It was the point at which the two things I cared about started pulling on each other.
Pharmacy, with code underneath it
I read Pharmacy at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, and graduated with First Class honours and as Best Graduating Student in the Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology. The detail that matters more than the grade is what my final-year thesis actually involved: shell scripting, Python, and a stack of 2D and 3D visualisation and molecular modelling tools, used to simulate how molecules interact.
That project taught me something I have relied on ever since. Pharmaceutical questions are often computational questions wearing a lab coat. If you can script, you can ask larger questions than the person who cannot.
Teaching, which came before everything else
Before I built anything, I taught. In pharmacy school I was tutorial master for my own class and for every junior class beneath it, and I did it every year until I graduated. The subjects were the ones people most often fail: medicinal chemistry, biostatistics, pharmaceutical calculations, computational chemistry, and the software that final-year students have to operate for their research without ever having been taught it.
I carried on teaching after graduation, and I have not really stopped. Today it is the RxHustle communities, where I teach and guide pharmacists preparing for licensing examinations, write the materials, and speak.
This matters more to the rest of the story than it looks. Teaching a subject to someone who is frightened of it forces you to find where the difficulty actually sits, which is the same skill as finding where a product actually breaks. RxHustle is not a departure from tutoring a class through biostatistics. It is the same job at a different scale.
Building for healthcare, from inside healthcare
While still studying, I started building. At Pharmalister I worked as a full-stack developer from 2020: PHP and Laravel, React, Firebase, MySQL schemas designed to carry a large and awkward product catalogue, plus the unglamorous automation that keeps a pharmaceutical business moving: Excel VBA, SKU generation, an invoice generator with a real user interface on top of a spreadsheet.
In 2021 I became Information Technology Manager at the International
Pharmaceutical Students’ Federation in The Hague, which meant being
responsible for ipsf.org and every regional site under it:
maintaining core PHP, standing up and managing WordPress installations
across regions, and fixing the things nobody notices until they break:
hosting, DNS, a missing DMARC record.
The pharmacy degree was never a detour from the engineering, and the engineering was never a hobby beside the pharmacy. Each one is the reason the other is worth anything.
Getting serious about the engineering
Between January 2023 and March 2024 I completed the twelve-month ALX Africa software engineering programme: C, shell scripting, Python, Git, JavaScript, TypeScript and React. I also spent three months in intensive technical SEO training with the Freelance Coalition for Developing Countries, which turned out to be more relevant to healthcare products than it sounds: if a pharmacist cannot find your resource when they search for it at 11pm before an exam, you have not really shipped it.
From 2023 I worked as a Flutter engineer at Televerse LLC on two products published to both the App Store and Google Play: Reacher Messenger and ReachMe Social. That work is not healthcare, and that is exactly why it belongs in the record: live video streaming with Agora RTC, scheduled cloud functions for disappearing messages, background media compression and upload pipelines, group polls, granular privacy settings, full theming across dark and light modes. Consumer messaging apps are unforgiving about latency, state and edge cases. It is good training for building things people rely on.
Clinical systems, and what they taught me
Between those roles I have built the kind of software that sits directly in a clinical workflow, which is a different discipline from building consumer products and is where most of my strongest opinions come from. Most of it lives in AionRx, an integrated healthcare platform: a public-facing e-pharmacy on one side, and on the other the systems clinical staff actually work in.
I built its electronic medical record for a healthcare clinic, reaching around 80% adoption among its staff. It did not start there. It started as a quick fix (Google Forms feeding Sheets), and that quick fix taught me a lesson the hard way when unrestricted edit permissions let staff modify records directly and the corruption cascaded into the production database. The rebuild, with real access controls, input validation and Google Apps Script automation, is the version that earned the adoption. What runs today is a Next.js application with PostgreSQL behind it.
I also built the MVP of its laboratory information management system, where the interesting problem turned out to be governance rather than features. I had relied on an audit log for accountability, and watched a staff member amend a patient’s test result after it had already been approved. The log recorded it faithfully and prevented nothing. So approved results became locked; corrections became formal amendments carrying a user, a timestamp and a reason; and notifying the patient became an explicit step rather than an assumption.
That rebuild changed how I think about clinical software generally. The question is rarely whether a user is permitted to do something. It is at what point the system should stop allowing it, and what has to be recorded when it does.
What I am doing now
RxHustle is where the two halves finally sit in the same product. It is a pharmacy education and career platform: exam preparation for licensing candidates, gamified self-study, timed CBT mock exams and a pharmacy blog, with a career marketplace in build. More than 4,000 pharmacists use it, most of whom arrived before there was a Google Play listing to install it from. It is the thing I would most like to be judged on.
Around it, I mentor young pharmacists from the RxHustle community who are moving into technology. This is not a side interest. The clinical understanding is the expensive half of the combination I keep arguing for, and it cannot be acquired in a twelve-week course, so the fastest route to more good healthcare software is more pharmacists who can build it. I would rather there were many of us than that this remained a rare profile.
Further back, FOSTOREXIA reached the finals at the IPSF World Congress in Seoul: a Roblox experience asking what gamification can, and cannot, do for the management of anorexia nervosa.
What I am looking for
Problems where the clinical understanding and the engineering have to be held by the same mind. Pharmacy technology, AI applied to clinical workflows, health education at scale, the systems that professionals actually touch every day. That is where the combination pays for itself.
I am also open to graduate research. My final-year thesis was computational rather than bench work, using shell scripting, Python and molecular modelling tools to simulate how molecules interact, and I taught computational chemistry for years afterwards. A lab working on AI in healthcare, computer-aided drug design or pharmacy informatics is getting someone who can do the science and build the tooling for it, which is a combination that usually takes two people.
It is a preference, not a boundary. The engineering carries across: I have shipped consumer messaging and streaming apps to both app stores, built dashboards, CRMs and storefronts, and I am open to good engineering and product work wherever it sits. If you are building something difficult, I would like to hear about it.
I speak at events too, on healthcare technology and on AI, software engineering and programming more generally, to clinical and technical audiences alike. The topics are here.