About

About

Hi, I’m Osakpolor Obaseki. Everyone calls me Seki.

I’m a software engineer from Lagos, Nigeria. I’ve spent the last 6+ years building distributed systems and keeping them alive in production. The pattern in everything I do is simple: I keep digging until the system stops being magic. Protocols, VMs, storage engines, deployment pipelines, whatever layer is hiding the answer. That’s the whole story behind this site’s tagline. Curiosity at its finest worst.

The journey so far

Protocol work. I spent two years at Nethermind working on production blockchain clients: the Nethermind Ethereum client (C#) and the Juno StarkNet client (Go and Rust). I led the redesign of Juno’s sequencing subsystem, implementing a Tendermint style consensus algorithm to move StarkNet away from a centralized sequencer. I fixed VM execution bugs in Rust, worked on libp2p networking (QUIC, Gossipsub), and once turned a multi second user facing latency into sub second by root causing a concurrency bug and designing a custom cache for it.

Keeping big systems honest. At Nethermind I also ran observability across a 4,000+ node network: Grafana, Prometheus, Seq, all on Kubernetes. Before that I was a founding engineer at JMP.chat, where I owned production end to end for a 24/7 voice, video and SMS platform with thousands of paying customers. Deployments, instrumentation, incident response, all of it.

Infrastructure and automation. At G-Research I built cloud agnostic, self hosted GitHub Actions runner infrastructure with a multi cloud auto scaling layer (Pulumi, TypeScript, Go). At Goldman Sachs I built deployment tooling for trading environments with Python, Ansible and a custom DSL.

Earlier. Core banking and interbank settlement services for platforms serving 50M+ users, open source maintenance for the Common Workflow Language community, and field data APIs for agritech here in Nigeria.

These days I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Miva Open University, building backend systems in Node.js and Go.

What I’m into

Consensus algorithms and the machinery of blockchains. Storage engines and commit logs. Observability that actually helps you debug instead of just looking pretty. And lately, AI tools with graph shaped interfaces instead of linear ones. I hold an M.Sc in Financial Engineering, and a B.Sc in Electrical/Electronic Engineering.

I write here about the systems I build and the rabbit holes I fall into.

Find me