In recent weeks, Microsoft’s acquisition of Github has made headlines and formed the topic of many conversations. This is because the repository hosting service is arguably the de-facto home of open-source software and the acquisition ignited a debate over the platforms centrality.

So, when it comes to the developer circles, GitHub is a big deal!

The recent listing of top contributors on the platform in Nigeria featured a lot of amazing names but the focus today is Victor Afolabi, an artificial intelligence and software engineer with specialised focus on building large scale software products and infrastructure.

Victor, a NEST trained software engineer who started coding in 2012 was 17TH on the list. “I started writing computer programs before I had a computer to run them. My first language was C & C++ but the first one I ran on a computer was Java. 6 years down the road, I am familiar with over 2 dozen programming language and developed a couple of medium & Large-scale products”, he explained.

When we asked him how he sees programming, he had an interesting reply, “Programming for me has been about building the future (you see the future in your head, press some buttons & voila, your dreams become reality). It’s such an exciting feeling.”.

On the GitHub success story, he has this to say…

A friend of mine sent me a message one afternoon that I am on the list of the top 18 Github contributors in Nigeria. I joined NEST in 2017 and that was the year I became active on GitHUB, I told my friend, Tomiide that before the end of the year I would have had over 1k contributions on the platform and interestingly before October 2017, I had already done 1500 contributions.

So yeah, the news was a very exciting one and I am more pumped up to continue my open source contribution to the Programming community.

The experience at PlanetNEST was a game changer for me on my journey…

I learnt the principles needed to become a world class developer and I feel so honoured to be part of this incredible organization. One of the works I am especially proud of was the chat bot (Rali on GidiCompare) I developed last year. “I think many of my contributions came from vFrame & many AI repos that achieved state-of-the-art results across a wide range of tasks”, he explained.

There has been a lot of conversations around how developers would react to the acquisition, so we asked Victor for his thoughts on the buy…

GitHub acquisition by Microsoft was a great purchase, I can’t wait to experience the transformation Microsoft is going to achieve especially with ElectronJS desktop applications. Microsoft definitely knows about the future & that developers are an essential part in creating that future we all crave for.

Congratulations to Victor on his win, which of the other names on the list do you know?