I was still very new to programming, and we had a course called CVE 107.

The course had a lot of fill-in-the-gap questions where the answer had to match the course material almost exactly. No synonyms, abbreviations, or even small punctuation mistakes.

Reading the material wasn't exactly my strong suit, and I found myself needing a better way to practise.

So I built one.

It was barely a “course app” by today's standards. Mostly HTML and JavaScript, with prompt() and alert() doing the heavy lifting.

I manually turned questions from different chapters into arrays of objects and built separate pages for them.

It never left my local environment, and it was eventually deleted.

But the idea stuck.

Later, I tried building something much bigger.

This time, I was learning backend development with Python, so I built a proper course-oriented application around what I had learned.

I was still very much a beginner. At one point, I even had to ask Kay to help me debug something.

It was another learning experience more than a finished product.

But I was getting closer to the thing I had originally imagined.

Eventually, I built another course platform and actually hosted it.

This was probably the closest I had gotten to the original vision.

The problem was that I got too excited about the technology and framework I was using. It worked, but the architecture and running costs weren't economical enough for what I wanted to build.

So again, it wasn't the final version.

But by this point, I knew I wasn't going to stop thinking about it.

Then came LearnNaija.

This time, I wasn't just building another project to learn a framework.

I had years of programming experience behind me, a much clearer idea of the kind of learning experience I wanted, and a better understanding of the constraints involved in actually running a product.

The original idea had started with:

Over time, it became something much bigger:

And that's where LearnNaija began.