In Nigeria, software doesn’t usually die because the code is “bad.” It dies because it was built for a world that doesn’t exist here.

1. Building for “Ideal Conditions”

Developers often build while sitting in air-conditioned offices with dedicated fiber internet. They assume the user has stable power, a fast device, and the patience to wait for a 15MB Javascript bundle to load. None of these are guaranteed.

The Survival Strategy

• Graceful Degradation: If the internet drops, the app shouldn’t just show a spinning wheel of death.
• Aggressive Caching: Store as much as possible locally to reduce server round-trips.
• Offline-First Design: In Nigeria, “Offline-First” isn’t a feature; it’s a survival tactic.
• The Rule: If your app becomes a brick the moment a user enters an elevator or a basement, it isn’t production-ready for this market.

2. Overengineering Too Early

I’ve seen teams of three developers try to implement a microservices architecture with Kubernetes for an MVP that hasn’t even hit 100 users.

What Works Better

• Monolith First: It’s faster to build, easier to deploy, and significantly cheaper to host.
• Choose Boring Tech: Use proven stacks (like Laravel, Node/Express, or Django) where you can easily find talent and community support.
• Scale on Pain: Only pay the “complexity tax” when your user growth literally forces you to. Complexity is debt; pay it only when required.

3. Ignoring Non-Functional Requirements

Most devs obsess over features and UI but ignore Observability. They ship, the system breaks in production, and they have no idea why because there are no logs or alerts. Then production hits—and everything burns.

Minimum Survival Stack

• Centralized Logging: Know exactly what happened 2 seconds before the crash.
• Error Tracking: Use tools like Sentry to catch bugs before users report them.
• Health Checks: Automated pings to ensure your database and APIs are actually breathing.

4. The “Hero Developer” Syndrome

The Mistake: Projects die when knowledge lives only in one person’s head. When that “rockstar” dev gets a remote job in USD or “japas” to Europe, the project collapses because no one else can maintain the code.

What Serious Teams Do

• Write Boring Code: Clear and maintainable is always better than clever and obscure.
• Documentation is a Feature: If it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist.
• Lower the Bus Factor: Always ask: “If our lead dev moves to Berlin tomorrow, does the company fold?”

How to Design Software That Survives

Optimize for Failure, Not Perfection: Assume networks will fail, APIs will timeout, and users will abandon flows. Design your logic to handle these interruptions gracefully.

The Mindset Shift: Writing code is the easy part. Designing systems that survive chaos is the real job. If you think your role ends at “it works on my machine,” you’re not a software engineer—you’re a coder.

The Bottom Line

In the Nigerian tech ecosystem, the difference between a high-growth startup and a failed experiment isn’t how many features you ship—it’s how your system handles the inevitable chaos of the real world. Success requires moving beyond just “writing code” and toward building resilient, observable, and maintainable engineering cultures.

The road to a successful launch is paved with local insights, smart architectural choices, and a refusal to ignore the “invisible” requirements that keep systems alive when traffic spikes or networks fail.