Hi, I'm Chiko đź‘‹

Welcome! I’m a product engineer with a knack for crafting delightful software. Here, I share my journey—ideas, guides, and insights about software engineering, design, startups and life. You can also find me on X and LinkedIn.

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Flutter Engineering by Majid Hajian

Programming

Deep dives into software engineering, architecture, and clean code

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Thoughts on coding with AI

Knowing when to use AI is key. I recently tweeted about turning off autocomplete in my editor, which felt like cutting off a safety net. Surprisingly, it resulted in a productivity boost. While this might suggest that AI was holding me back, that’s not the whole story. AI produced a lot of output, but as we all know, quantity doesn’t always equal quality. After the AI generated code, I often had to clean it up...
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How to use UUIDs in Flutter using Drift

Building an offline-first app often requires thoughtful architecture, especially when syncing data between offline and online states. As a Flutter enthusiast, I rely on the Drift library for offline database storage. Recently, I faced the challenge of ensuring seamless synchronization between the app and the server. If you have dealt with this problem at any level, then you’d know one of the big problems is consistency - any entity that is generated, or modified on...
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Object oriented design: Constructors and destructors

This is a follow up from the first part accessible here: Object Oriented design, a friendly intro Class behavior In the previous blog post, I mentioned what an object does is its behavior. The key things that determine behavior are the methods we define on the class. For example, if we have a class called Dog, it stands to reason that it should “bark”, “walk” and probably sleep too. Methods or functions that exist on...
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Object Oriented design: a friendly intro

One of the ways I prefer to build applications is by using Object Oriented programming. In a recent video, I went into the tech I currently use on the backend and front, and most of it is, of course, heavily influenced by what it allows me to do. In this post I want to offer a quick glimpse into what Object oriented actually means, using PHP for demonstration purposes. Programming languages have what we call...
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Success

Lessons learned on the path to personal and professional growth

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Doing work: team

[This is part of a leadership series where I share small snippets about team building and success] This year, I’ve been learning to build a team—a process that’s ironic because I’ve largely been working solo. But working alone has given me the space to reflect on what makes teams thrive. Throughout my journey, I’ve been fortunate to grow in rooms filled with talented people. There’s a lot of discourse around “being the least experienced person...
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Cold showers

During October, I decided to run a random experiment and stick to taking nothing but cold showers, regardless of the weather. Why would anyone do this? The idea was shared with me by my brother, who went through a month-long experience of taking showers at 5 a.m. at the advice of his therapist. I was intrigued by this (I love body hacking and will try most things at least once!) so I decided to challenge...
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Finishing

I want to share an observation that I made and have wanted to put into words for a while. A lot of times we talk about starting something, going for our dreams, never quitting or (eventually) quitting without paying attention to the process of executing. I think in-between start and result, process is something that needs a lot of thought, especially the means to create a long streak of consistent results or action.
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I changed jobs, again!

Last year was a busy and also difficult year for most people. I hadn’t realized how hard it hit me until someone pointed out that I had written just one blog post the whole year! Of couse with Covid and major shifts in how people could socialize and work together, everything was so unpredictable. The one thing that I was still very happy about though, was the work I was doing over at JaSure. Since...
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Startups

Building products, growing businesses, and navigating the startup world

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Startup Bus Africa 2013

Yes, I got accepted to attend the inaugural Start up Bus Africa, a 5 day hackathon on wheels from Harare to Cape Town! This event is bringing different kinds of amazing people from all over the world to form groups and work on some amazing ideas during the trip that we will eventually pitch to Richard Branson! 
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Great startup podcasts to listen to

I have recently become an avid podcast collector over the past month or so and I’m clearly enjoying it. Long before downloading podcasts was even considered normal consumption of internet bandwidth, many of my mates were onto downloading a ton of them, daily. I remember just how odd that struck me and I couldn’t figure their line of thinking whether they thought the internet would be shut down one day and they’d regret missed opportunities...
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What happened at Cultureshift

It’s a few days after the two week Culture Shift ideation and hackathon hosted by the British Council, Jumpstart and Culture Code (UK) and for most of us, we are still basking in the afterglow. It was a wonderful event hosted to help local artists mingle with the techies and try to hack together some real solutions to their problems.
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