Writing about education technology, designing for low-bandwidth realities, and the patient work of making institutions a little more humane.
A plain primary-source account of the school software I ship — registers, timetables, gate logistics, and parent messages on unreliable networks.
School fees break every assumption payment software makes. What rebuilding a bursary on double-entry bookkeeping taught me about money people can believe.
Nobody sends a thank-you note for a register that added up. On why the measure of school software is the silence when nothing goes wrong.
Most software assumes the network is there — fast, cheap, always on. Building between Benin City and Porto Alegre, you unlearn that fast.
A school's relationship with a parent is built almost entirely out of small messages — and every one builds trust or quietly erodes it.
The most dangerous hundred meters of the day are the last ones. On pickup, dismissal, and knowing the right person collected the right child.
An SMS looks like the cheapest thing in the world — which is exactly what makes it so easy to do badly. The real economics of reaching every parent.
The most successful school-management system ever built has no logo. Any software that hopes to replace the spreadsheet first has to understand why it won.
An attendance register looks like a list of names. It is really a promise about who is safe, who is missing, and who has been told.
Cover is the stress test of school operations. Get a substitute into the right room with the right plan by 8 a.m. and your systems work.
Working between Benin City and Porto Alegre changed how I think about reliability, latency, and what “always on” really means.
In a school, nobody has a spare hour for your onboarding. Software for busy institutions has to be learnable in the gaps between everything else.
The message about money is the most delicate thing software sends for a school. Tone is infrastructure — as real as the database behind it.
AI will run your school, the pitch says. The smaller question underneath: whose model, running where? Why a self-hosted open model can beat a frontier API on cost, privacy, and the weakest connection in the building.
The most requested AI feature in schools is a bot that answers parents on its own. Why that's the wrong default for an anxious, high-stakes audience — and what to build instead.