Workshop
Things I am building, testing or taking apart right now.
Unfinished on purpose. These are the experiments, pilots and side systems that sit next to the finished work. Some will become case studies, some will be abandoned, and all of them are teaching me something.
(01) — On the bench
01Experiment2026
Optical neural network, in NumPy↗
A photonic neural network simulated from the physics up: Mach-Zehnder interferometers as the trainable unit, transfer matrices for the layers, MNIST as the test.
384 phase angles trained with finite-difference gradients, because a physical chip cannot backpropagate. Three optical layers, photodetection as the readout. I built it to understand how light does matrix multiplication before I read about it on a datasheet.
02Experiment2026
Quantum randomness validation↗
A benchmark that puts pseudo-random, simulated-quantum and real quantum entropy sources through the same battery of tests and scores them.
Chi-square, Kolmogorov–Smirnov, autocorrelation and runs tests; Shannon, min-, collision and guessing entropy. Real quantum bytes come from the ANU QRNG API. The linear congruential generator fails at lag 13, exactly where the maths says it should.
03Analysis2026
Nigeria crude-oil export intelligence↗
Fifteen years of export data, a log-log elasticity model, GARCH volatility and a trade-finance gap estimate, written up as the kind of report a development bank would commission.
Brent price explains 89.5% of revenue variance with an elasticity of 0.74. Post-2021 volatility is structurally higher. AfCFTA has not moved intra-African oil trade, and the reasons are refineries and payment rails, not tariffs.
04Live2025
Scholarithm↗
A scholarship discovery platform: a Selenium scraper feeds a FastAPI backend, a weighted recommender matches opportunities to a student's profile, React on top.
Built to solve a problem I had. The recommender is deliberately simple: academic level, country eligibility, funding preference and a few extra signals, weighted and explained. Simple and inspectable beat clever and opaque for this.
05Pilot2025 –
Sahara Deliveries
A last-mile delivery venture for Northern Nigeria, co-founded to work inside the constraints of the Kano–Kaduna–Sokoto corridor rather than around them.
At MVP and in active pilot. Low formal logistics coverage, spread-out communities and thin tech adoption among small businesses are the design brief, not the excuse.
06In production2026 –
Demand forecasting and routing
Forecasting and routing models running inside GrandGale Technologies' platforms, alongside NLP matching pipelines that handle 1,000+ requests a day.
Roughly 90% forecast accuracy, with an estimated 25% reduction in delivery time and 15% lower operating cost. The less glamorous half of the job is the ML development standards and the five junior engineers I mentor.
(02) — Things I am learning
- 01Photonic computing, and where the energy actually goes in a matrix multiply
- 02Probability calibration, and why a well-ranked model can still be a bad lender
- 03Evaluating retrieval systems honestly, especially the answers they refuse to give
- 04Oil, FX and trade finance in Nigeria, as a systems problem
- 05Building hardware that survives a village with no grid