About Me — Adebayo Ijidakinro. My name is Adebayo Ijidakinro or Ade…
By: Adebayo Ijidakinro
Tags: About Me, Language, Travel, Programming, Introduction

About Me — Adebayo Ijidakinro

I’m a programmer who loves to travel, loves languages, and loves people

My name is Adebayo Ijidakinro or Ade for short. Most people who try to say my name butcher it. Some people would call me Abuday, Arde, and a host of other atrocious attempts. But that’s fine, I respond to all of them.

My Dad is from Nigeria. He came to America on a government scholarship. He’s a very intelligent man. My mom is from Arizona. They met in college, got married, and about 8 years later had me.

The story of my name

Interesting story about my name, it means “I have come home to meet or find joy.” My father was in Nigeria when I was born. So when he arrived home he felt that he had come home to find joy, me. That’s why he named me Adebayo.

The story of my last name is pretty interesting. The last name Ijidakinro is only had by one family in Nigeria. Anyone with the last name Ijidakinro is related to me. The name was given to my great-grandfather. During the war, he performed a very heroic act. To this day, unfortunately, none of us know what that heroic act was. But it had such an impact on the people, that they changed his surname to Ijidakinro. Which means…

“Only an act of God can stop a valiant man.”

I can’t lie, I wear the last name like a badge of honor. Even though I did nothing to earn it myself, it still is special to me to know the history of the name.

Learning to Program

I started learning how to program when I was 5 years old. My brother who is 7 years older, and was learning himself, started to teach me. I’ll never forget the first program that he helped me make. Two variables each stored a number, and the program printed the sum of the numbers onto the screen. It was sorcery to me. I thought to myself, how does X plus Y equal a number? What is this trickery of men? I pondered over this for two years. Then at 7 years old, I had a “haha” moment.

“X and Y aren’t letters, they somehow store numbers!!”

The rest was history.

Now, I’m an iOS Developer. I love programming. I love creating new things from scratch. I love solving problems. I’ve worked as the lead developer or CTO for 6 startups, and I’m a startup founder. I love the startup world because a few people in a room can have as large an impact as a large organization. Even if the startup doesn’t do well, you always have the experience and the knowledge that you acquired from the work.

I started writing because I want to share what I’ve learned with others. My experiences. My failures. My successes. I focus mainly on wring about startups. The startup world is like sailing in icy waters. It takes a lot of experience to know what problems to avoid, and how to avoid them. I also write about other topics too though.

I love to travel, language, and music

I love to travel so much. I’ve been to 13 different countries, most of which I went to in the last 3 years. I lived in Taiwan for 3 years doing Bible teaching work as a Jehovah’s Witness, and while there was able to learn to speak Chinese and start learning Indonesian.

I recently built an app for travel. The goal is to build a map of spots similar to Google Maps but entirely generated by app users. It has a long way to go before it contains all the spots I want, but we’re getting there slowly. I also built a blogging platform for it that’s specifically designed for people who want to have a travel blog. I love to travel so much, I just had to build some apps for the travel community.

I love to play the guitar. It’s my stress reliever. When I’m bummed, I write a song about it, and typically by the end of the song I’m feeling a lot better. I love reggae, Bob Marley is my favorite of that genre. I like Jazz a lot too. Actually, I like all genres of music!

My favorite musician of all time — Fela Kuti

My favorite musician of all time is a guy named Fela Kuti. If you haven’t ever heard of him, you’ve got to go check him out. He was a musician in Nigeria in the 70’s and 80's. He is probably the best musician I’ve ever listened to. His music is like a mixture of Afrobeat, Funk, Jazz, with some salsa elements. And his message is very deep. Some songs I recommend of his are.

Water No Get Enemy — He speaks both Yoruba and English in this song

Lady — He speaks only English in this song

Coffin For Head Of State — Only English

As a heads up, some of his songs are pretty long, up to 30 minutes. His longest one is 47 minutes. But it’s 47 minutes of epic music. His story is amazing too. At the time he was composing the Nigerian government was very corrupt, so he wrote music exposing them. Well, the government didn’t like that so they tried to silence him. They harassed him for years. At one point they sent 1000 soldiers to the place where he made his music and raided it. They killed some people there, even his mother. He and his band were thrown in prison multiple times. He responded by writing multiple songs about the events and continuing to expose governmental hypocrisy. The dude is a legend.

Well, that’s about all there is to know about me. If you ever want to chat, send me a private note, respond to one of my stories, or just email me at adebayoiji@gmail.com. If you listen to Fela and like it let me know.

To send you off, here’s a few pictures of my brother and sister-in-laws dog. It’s too adorable not to share.