Hey, I’m Olu! I am a full stack developer for local government in the UK, a writer, and a content creator. I also like to sew, to read, apprendre français, and am extremely online.
Trying to tell a coherent story of my political and technological life is hard. I was pretty interested from the first time I saw a computer. I did the final installation steps on the NTL dial-up as a small child and immediately found a way to play games on a connection that timed out every 20 minutes. I took apart a few broken household appliances in the hope of being able to put them together again; a CD player, a robot dog and a clock radio.
I find it “weird” - aka obvious in the conditions we live in, but sad and hard to sit with - that despite this early interest I wasn’t really encouraged or even had it suggested to me that computers were a thing people could build jobs around, and that maybe I could be those people. I mostly assumed/hoped I could be a writer and worked towards that until university, where the naff (politically and craft-wise) and cutthroat world of student newspapers doused any enthusiasm I had for journalism.
Simultaneously, I tried to get more involved in student groups, namely social enterprises, charities, student politics and activism.
I found the social enterprise side hard to reconcile with the magnitude of the problems we were grappling with. Why were a few random students supplying micro-loans (to prevent further poverty) and solar-powered lights (to prevent lung and other health damage, and prevent poverty from buying and burning kerosene) if it’s evidence-based and vitally important? The “this entire thing is a sandpit for us to test out business ideas” feel didn’t sit well with me, anyway.
The charities had other issues; big talk about inclusion and changing the world, limited or no impact on it, beyond the locus of issues that students could reasonably control, and in the case of my campus at the time, could get other students to care about. I struggled with the incessant team building exercises, and away days that seemed to be more about raising our enthusiasm for the project than any actual outcomes; I’d be more in favour of this now if they were honest about it, but it annoyed me at the time. I was most heavily involved in meta-charities; mental health for students and another around getting students to volunteer. The mental health side, whilst deeply impactful on my politics and outlook on the world ever since, showed me how little funding and care is put into this vital work, and as a mad person I couldn’t see myself as a person who would be taken seriously, outside the “lived experience/service user” lens. The volunteering charity gave me a lot of what i can only describe as class whiplash; people saying how important it was to encourage volunteering on one hand, our parent charity in Oxford letting slip that certain populations were not the sort they reached out to due to them being “hard to reach” aka urban and scary.
All this was enough for me not to consider charity work as my path after university.
Student politics I always found difficult. Student union elections, charitably only at my uni and only at the time, seemed at best a giant popularity contest. I discovered I definitely wasn’t interested in becoming a politician.
Activism on the other hand seemed to
For the purposes of this post, I’m mostly going to focus on what I’m currently thinking about, more of which can be found on my blog and my digital garden.