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About — Daniel Olawoyin

Engineer. Translator of vague ideas into shipped products.

I started writing code at a desk in Bayelsa, Nigeria, in 2017 — fixing other people's broken WordPress installs for ₦5,000 a job. Five years later I'm helping founders launch AI-native SaaS to global users. The throughline has always been the same: someone has a problem, and I won't leave until it's solved.

Let's talk
Daniel Olawoyin
Based in
Lagos, NG
Years coding
5+
Languages
EN · YO
Time zone
UTC+1

The arc, briefly.

My HND is in Dental Technology. I taught myself to code because the local hospital's appointment system kept losing patient records, and nobody was going to fix it but me. That fix turned into a freelance gig, which turned into a Udacity nanodegree, which turned into a career.

By 2021 I was a full-stack developer at Digitec building TypeScript-heavy commerce platforms with secure payment integrations. By 2024 I was contracting frontend at Hawksworth Advisors, where I learned the discipline of shipping inside enterprise constraints — design systems, accessibility budgets, code review culture.

"The best engineers I've worked with don't argue about stacks. They argue about outcomes."

Where I am now.

Today I freelance through Melo Designer GmbH, focused on the seam between humans and machines: voice agents, retrieval-augmented systems, multi-tenant SaaS platforms. I've integrated OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs into production apps for marketing automation, EdTech, and customer service.

My favourite kind of work: a founder shows up with a half-formed idea, a small budget, and a real timeline. We talk for an hour, I sketch the architecture in a notebook, and ten weeks later we're onboarding paying users.

What I'm not.

I'm not a "vibes-first" engineer who ships demos and disappears. I write tests, document tradeoffs, and stay around long enough to see the system survive its first real users. I'm also not a maximalist — if a problem can be solved with a Postgres trigger and a cron job, I will not build you a microservice.

Outside the editor.

I cook (badly), follow Premier League (loudly), and read more sci-fi than is strictly healthy. If you want a quick read of the kind of person I am: I will absolutely send you a 2,000-word answer to a Slack question if I think the question deserves it.

Principles

Five things I won't compromise on.

/01

Outcome before output

I'd rather ship one feature that moves a metric than ten that decorate a roadmap. Every PR has to answer "why now."

/02

Pragmatic AI, not magical AI

LLMs are tools, not pixie dust. I add them where they earn their keep — and rip them out when they don't.

/03

Boring tech for the boring parts

Postgres, Node, monoliths. Save the novelty budget for the parts that actually need it.

/04

Async, written, transparent

You'll always know what I'm working on, what's blocked, and when it ships. No status meetings to find out.

/05

Code as a love letter to the next dev

Even if that's me in six months. Documented, typed, tested. Anything else is debt.

/06

I'll solve it.

Whatever it is. If I can't, I'll find you the person who can. That's the whole promise.

Stack

Tools I reach for daily.

Frontend
  • Next.js
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind
  • Redux
  • HTML5 / CSS
Backend
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • Django
  • REST APIs
  • Prisma
  • Docker
Data & infra
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Supabase
  • Pinecone
  • Git
  • Strapi · Sanity · Prismic
AI layer
  • OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Google Gen AI
  • ElevenLabs
  • LangChain.js
  • CrewAI
Highlights

A timeline, condensed.

Full experience
2025–NOWFreelance Full-Stack at Melo Designer GmbH — AI SaaS, voice agents, RAG.
2023–2025Contract Frontend at Hawksworth Advisors — TS components, +25% perf.
2024–2025Full-Stack at Atsur — UX automation, +10% engagement.
2023–2024Full-Stack at SageByte — refactor, –15% API latency.
2021–2023Full-Stack at Digitec — payments, –15% defects.
2022Udacity / ALX-T Full-Stack Nanodegree.