Case studies
Each study covers the problem, what I read before writing code, the decisions that shaped the system, what broke, what I didn't know going in, and what I'd do differently. Written first-person, grounded in real commits.
The Gambia has no complete civil registration. Deaths go largely unrecorded, so there is no national time series of age-specific death rates, and the country is absent from the Human Mortality Database, the standard input for mortality forecasting.
Banks in West Africa hold the data that could power local AI. They cannot share it. Privacy law, customer trust, and competitive advantage keep loan books and transaction histories on bank servers.
Gambians have almost no access to legal information. Lawyers are scarce and expensive, a one-hour consultation is more than a week's wage for most. The laws themselves are scattered across PDFs that most people will never find or be able to read.
Microfinance institutions in West Africa make lending decisions on intuition because the analytical infrastructure isn't there.
I kept skipping days on my own learning and lying to myself about it. Streak apps don't work because they're trivially fakeable, you tap 'yes I studied' and move on.
Job application forms are a disaster for both sides. Candidates dump CVs into black holes; hiring teams drown in unqualified applications.
I had been reading the Qur'an my whole life through scrolling apps that treat the book as a list of 6,236 numbered cells. Every Quran app does the same thing: scroll, tap, scroll, tap. But the Qur'an is not linear. It loops. It cross-references itself.
Tech news is unreadable. The volume per day is in the hundreds of thousands of articles globally, and most of it is noise, patch notes, gadget sales, recycled press releases, identical takes on the same Reuters wire.
Remittances are ~20% of The Gambia's GDP. Every Gambian family has someone abroad sending money home. The Central Bank of The Gambia has internal forecasts of FX rates and remittance inflows; ordinary Gambians don't.
I wanted to learn actuarial science by doing, not by reading textbooks. Built a full life insurance risk model for Sub-Saharan Africa from scratch, mortality, survival analysis, premium pricing, Monte Carlo VaR.