Writing desk

Blog.

Essays, field notes, and practical reflections from building full-stack products, teaching backend development, and tuning the small details users feel.

Cover story

The Reversal Problem: What Nigeria's Instant Payment Rails Get Wrong

A misdirected NIP transfer and two months of chasing a court order taught me something the incident reports don't say out loud: Nigeria's payment rails were built to be fast and final, never to be reversible — and that gap is a distributed-systems problem, not a legal one.

Favour Max-OtiJul 29, 20266 min read

From the archive

8 notes available

Jul 16, 2026

A Self-Healing Multi-Channel Payment Service in Go: Provider Fallbacks, Circuit Breakers, and the Trade-offs Nobody Mentions

A platform engineer's take on rebuilding a Django/Redis payment-routing design in Go — and where the sharp edges are.

Favour Max-Oti
May 5, 2026

Debugging a Blue-Green Deployment from Scratch: Six Errors, Six Fixes, One Working System

We recently set up a blue-green deployment pipeline for a Node.js/Next.js marketplace application running on a single VPS, with GitHub Actions as the CI/CD layer and nginx as the reverse proxy. The sy

Favour Max-Oti
May 5, 2026

Why I Started Teaching Software Development (And What I Got Wrong)

I didn’t start teaching because I thought I was a great teacher. I started teaching because I thought I understood software development well enough to help someone else get into it. That assumption di

Favour Max-Oti
Mar 21, 2026

Building ACA Athlons: An Honest Walkthrough of Our LMS Sprint

We built Athlons in a sprint. A real one — not the kind where you say "sprint" and mean three comfortable weeks. Athlons is the Learning Management System for Attueyi Coding Academy (ACA), a tech scho

Favour Max-Oti
Mar 19, 2026

From One Process to 1,000 Users: How I Scaled a Nigerian Marketplace API Without Rewriting It

There is a specific kind of dread that comes from looking at a production application you built and realising it would fall apart under any real load. Not because the code is bad, but because certain

Favour Max-Oti
Jan 6, 2026

Lessons from a Multi-Tenant School Portal - What Worked, What Hurts, and What I’d Change Next Time

The first time I spun up this multi-tenant school management portal on my machine, I didn’t start with the code. I started with a question: “If I were a school admin, would I ever trust this thing with my students’ data?” Ten minutes later, I was...

Favour Max-Oti