Rows, Rounds, and Revelations

My life as a database administrator and AI researcher

There was a time when my world fit inside a ledger book — a ruled rectangle, margins reddened by the sun, pages smelling faintly of dust and palm oil. In Nigeria, numbers were never just numbers; they were the sounds of small commerce finding its balance — debits and credits like a call-and-response choir. My earliest education in data came not from a textbook but from markets that woke up before the dawn, where stall keepers counted coins the way a cardiologist counts beats, listening for a skipped note, a borrowed future. I didn’t know it then, but I was already learning the anatomy of systems: the way pattern becomes pulse, and pulse becomes life.

Years later, I found myself in a chilled server room, the air-conditioning perpetually set to a season no human favored. There, the racks stood like rows of sentry pines, green LEDs blinking with the stubborn regularity of hope. I began as a database administrator — custodian of schemas, defender of indexes, the person who could stare at a slow query plan and tell you where it hurt. People thought the job was about machines. In truth, it was about stories too numerous for paper. A database is a city without streets, its neighborhoods separated not by rivers but by foreign keys; its gossip stored in logs; its folklore coded as…