David Oduse

There is something increasingly strange about the way people start startups today. The barrier to producing software has fallen so dramatically that someone can have an idea in the morning, spend a few hours prompting an AI coding tool, have something that looks like a product by evening, buy a domain, generate a logo, put together a landing page, change their LinkedIn headline to “Founder & CEO,” and announce to the world that they have launched a startup. The announcement gets a few congratulations, someone asks whether they are raising, another person offers to make an introduction to an investor, and suddenly there is a feeling of momentum. But what actually moved? This is a phenomenon I eventually termed " startup theatre ." It is the production of all the visible artifacts associated with entrepreneurship without necessarily doing the difficult work that makes those artifacts meaningful. The pitch deck exists. The MVP exists. The company name exists. The LinkedIn an...

As Monesize's infrastructure keeps growing, security monitoring had to evolve beyond checking individual servers, reviewing application logs and responding to vulnerabilities when they surface. A production environment generates too much security information for that approach to remain practical. System logs, application events, package inventories, authentication activity and network traffic all contain useful signals, but those signals become much more valuable when they can be collected centrally and investigated in context. That led us to build a self-hosted Security Information and Event Management system, or SIEM, for Monesize. The objective was not simply to install a security dashboard. We wanted a central security monitoring layer that could collect telemetry from our workloads, identify vulnerabilities in installed software, inspect network activity, generate security alerts and give us a single place from which to investigate what was happening across the environment. We...

Look at the image below. Depending on where you are from, what you believe, and what experiences you have had, you may see nothing more than a simple symbol. But if you are Nigerian, there is a good chance that the symbol immediately reminds you of one person: Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Image Credit : Favpng.com What makes that interesting is that there is no photograph of him in the image. There is no name, political slogan, campaign message, party logo or presidential title. There is simply a visual symbol that has been repeatedly associated with him over a long period of time. The association has become strong enough that the symbol can function as a shortcut to the person. The State House has itself described the symbol associated with his cap as having become his "trademark." There is another interesting layer to this. The same symbol can produce completely different emotional reactions in different Nigerians. One person may look at it with admiration, another may feel resentme...