Mark Essien

When coding with AI, the primary speed constraint is your own rate of review.

A couple of million years ago, it stopped raining in the Sahara.

All human invention is done by cities.

Exponential startup growth is something extraordinary.

In Nigeria, the treasury bill rate has hovered around 20% for a long time.

Recently, listening to a podcast between two prominent Silicon Valley business leaders, one of them told an anecdote.

An organisation is primarily made up of feedback loops.

As a schoolboy, I remember looking at my friends and seeing a fierce brightness in their eyes.

In this philosophical exploration, I offer a theory of gravity based on basic principles.

Let’s imagine a fictional crypto trading platform called Bincoin.

Globally, there is an alarming trend - human birth rates are dropping rapidly.

I’m the founder and CEO of Hotels.ng Hotels.ng - one of the biggest online hotel booking agencies in sub-saharan africa.

There are two different people living on the same piece of land - with two different languages and two different religions.

Nigeria has a weird system of sharing money among federal states.

The 2023 Nigeria Election was an incredible event where a minor candidate with a tiny party rode on social media support to getting almost the same number of votes as the ruling party and the former ruling party.

My phone pinged: “Tell Mark Essien they are coming for him.”

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings lived in exactly the same way.

Micro-services may be good for scaling, but they introduce a lot of complexity to software.

Yes, deep neural networks are alive.

Many of us write tens of thousands of words yearly.

The problem There are many Governments who struggle to run companies.

Techniques A technique is a specific type of knowledge that a person can gain that is applicable in a wide array of circumstances.

At Hotels.ng, we use 6 servers - all are fully dedicated, baremetal servers.

Introduction In Nigeria, it’s very difficult for small businesses to raise small capital: funding of the range N3m to N100m is scarce.

The most expensive thing any company can do is to start a project, and not complete it.

One of the best things crypto could achieve is this: I go on a website in Nigeria, and I specify that I want to send 100€ to Germany.

We’ve all heard the advice about focusing, but it never quite seems to sink in.

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Close to my home, there is this park that used to be a graveyard.

I recently watched the TV show Atypical on Netflix.

In this post, I would like to suggest an alternative to Proof of Work and Proof of Stake in Crypto.

A field of sunflowers sat beside another field covered with grass.

I can hear the rain coming in the distance and my plans for today have been washed away. — @imogiemubarak June 6, 2017 Mubarak is never going to age.

Some companies are too early in a market.

A few months ago, I came up with an idea - let’s (Hotels.ng) do an internship program for software developers.

There is this disconnect between a non-technical CEO and the technical team.

Focus on making users use your product before you over-invest time in building the product.

A few things I have noticed that one should take note of as one manages people: See the future You must see the future.

(This post needs to be edited, the images are missing) I conceived of the idea for Hotels.ng in early 2012.

It’s quite easy to be good enough at something that everyone around you praises you.

The HNG Internship is one of the largest software developer training programs in Africa.

I posted this picture on twitter, and got some DMs and questions as to how we use that setup to power the Hotels.ng call-center.

Hotels.ng is looking to hire very smart people.

Hotels.ng is about two years old now.

Recently, I have been introduced to the concept of “100 years from now”.

The only true currency we humans have is time.

I founded Hotels.ng in 2013, at a time when it was impossible to book any hotels online in Nigeria.

The big man at the door glared at me for an uncomfortably long time.

You often hear people say that you should make your product inherently viral.

I’ve noticed something that is not immediately obvious - rejections without explanations can also be very helpful.