A Nation Without Barriers to Innovation By Adora Nwodo, The XploreR.

 I can be in Lagos, Nigeria, and then I can put on a headset, and the next thing I am seeing myself in a museum in Japan and immersed in that experience. So I could be in the Japan museum and I could just be walking in my room and I think I’m walking in the museum and I can accidentally hit my head on the door because my room is actually a room and the museum is not a “real thing” but at that moment, I forgot myself for a bit.

”These concepts and experiences are what define the XR world, where the speaker above, Adora Nwodo, plays in. She specifically works as a Cloud Engineer at Microsoft, Nigeria where she creates documentation on how to use mixed reality systems as well as build other services that allow other developers to build user apps and distribute them.

“With virtual reality, you are completely immersed in a digital experience. So when you put on a headset, you’re not able to know or see what’s going on in your physical world anymore, because you are immersed in the whole experience that is different from your physical world”

“The virtual reality experience is 100% digital. It immerses you in that experience but the AR experience isn’t 100% digital, they’re just like different digital things that are immersed in your space. Personally, I tend to call mixed reality AR on steroids. I believe that mixed reality is a form or an enhancement of what augmented reality is or what the basic version of augmented reality is because I think that AR is a very important technology. I feel like AR can do a lot in this world and for some weird reasons a bunch of people is still sleeping on it but I think that that technology has a lot of potentials that have not been tapped into just yet.” She continued.

Adora’s affinity towards computing and coding sprung at a very young age and she pursued it by building basic websites and later by studying Computer Science at the University of Lagos, earning a First Class Distinction in 2017. In furtherance of her love for the field and a desire to make an impact, Adora has planted and continues to plant peer and mentoring communities digitally where a thriving team of members termed “adorable” share opportunities and gain knowledge through active participatory workshops and forums. She is motivated to do this work at UnStark by her deep desire that more young Nigerians get into tech because of the opportunities that exist in it. From all the experience she has gained so far, and the pitfalls she wishes didn’t exist for her as a first-time joiner in a global tech firm, Adora is in the finishing stages of publishing a manual to help others navigate a career in the AR industry. The book titled “Cloud Engineering Book For Beginners” aims to simplify cloud engineering by discussing its history and future as well as the career paths available.

“As a person, on your own, you also want to make sure that you are being in charge of situations that you can control and things that you can’t control are not things that you are focusing on or complaining about, even when you can’t do anything about it”

She is not holding any grudges against any of the learning career moments nor does she want a do-over.  “When it comes to my career, I wouldn’t want to change anything. I’ve been lucky by the people I have been surrounded with. Having, even if they’re not mentors, but people that you can talk to about your career plan, having people that you look up to, people that you can talk to, people that can actually advise you, in whatever career decisions you’re making is good. I feel like that’s something that I have always constantly had around me, which has helped me make good decisions when it comes to my careers so I wouldn’t want to go back to change anything career-wise”

Adora is happy to take things one step at a time, keeping an open mind and accepting things as they turn out so she’s not making or at least not holding on too tightly to plans for too far out. With each day that she remains a Software Engineer, she works at getting better at it. While she holds a vision of being an Individual Contributor (IC), she is not opposed to veering off to new paths and adventures as she partakes of new information and experiences. 

“I feel like wherever it is that you are, you should embrace interdependence because it covers teamwork, it covers being a good team player, it covers being a good communicator, it covers a lot of things”

Technical skills vary from time to time and from sector to sector and industry to industry and even department to department and thus Adora doesn’t have a rigid opinion on what hard skills must be acquired today. She however feels strongly that certain soft skills are foundational and transactional and should be sought after by young people today. Key, according to her, is an all-encompassing term called interdependence. She describes it as the quality of being able to successfully manage relationships and communication with people on all levels. She also points out proactiveness and having a growth mindset as other soft skills that are important.

Adora is very optimistic about Nigeria’s future and she hopes to see the country place a high premium on competence rather than connection. She hopes that in the coming days of the country’s future, having the right qualifications equates to successful endeavors as she believes that will encourage more and more people to sharpen their skills, invest in themselves, and innovate since they are guaranteed great returns. She also pines for Nigeria’s policies and regulations to become favorable and tolerant to tech businesses, especially startups, to divorce the country’s young minds from the antipathy they have towards initiating solutions within the country. 

If you’re not able to learn new things, you are always only going to know what you already knew and at some point, what you know may become obsolete and what happens then. So being able to constantly learn, helps your brain constantly evolve”

“Right now it’s like, why am I bothering about innovation? If there was a chance that you can build this thing without any fear of there’s a chance that I’m going to start building something today and tomorrow there is one policy that is going to be passed that could literally close my business. I know that policies are always going to be passed. They’re always regulations and it’s not only in this part of the world but everywhere else but it would be easier if these regulations didn’t cripple people as much so that people could actually be more innovative because if you’re able to build things, it’s going to attract people to you, to your company, to your country and that attraction, in turn, creates some kind of demand for whatever it is that you are selling in that time, which would, in turn, be good for your economy, which would, in turn, be good for everybody”.