Tilda Udufo spends her days thinking about the invisible friction that stops a person from writing their first line of public code. Mornings would find her in a cluttered corner of her Lagos flat, headphones on, calendar packed with mentor calls from around the globe for Outreachy, yet the memory of her own start still sits close to the surface. She remembers the specific frustration of trying to understand logic on a six-inch mobile screen because she did not yet own a laptop. She spent months studying "strange languages" on Sololearn while her peers in more traditional paths followed a curriculum that she realised, quite early on, was disconnected from real-world engineering practice. Open source is the closest thing technology has to a public labour market. A GitHub history can speak long before a recruiter ever does. In Nigeria and across much of Africa, where formal routes into global software jobs remain uneven and entry-level roles are limited, that visibility matters. Open source collapses that distance. It lets a self-taught developer in Lagos ship code that gets reviewed by maintainers in Europe, used by companies in the US, and referenced in interviews anywhere. But visibility comes with conditions. Contributing assumes access to tools that are not evenly distributed: a laptop that can run local environments, steady electricity, enough data to clone repositories and test changes, and the confidence to ask questions in public. When those basics are inconsistent, participation carries a quiet cost. The gap between Africa and more developed markets in global contributions is often less about ability than about whether the infrastructure exists to support persistence. Udufo knows that cost firsthand. The distance between a self-taught student in Nigeria and a lead organiser for a global open-source program is usually measured in years of quiet, unrecorded labour. She closed that distance by refusing to let her starting conditions define her ceiling. She moved from private tutorials to the public scrutiny of Mozilla and ESLint, eventually becoming one of Major League Hacking’s top 50 honorees, turning her early doubt into documentation that now helps others navigate the same path. Back home, Back to basics Her entry into technology was not a grand ambition but a by-product of proximity, much like many Nigerian code paths that begin when an older sibling is already experimenting with a screen. For Udufo, it began at home. She grew up in a house with three brothers and two sisters, where her only goal was to pass her secondary school exams and move on to the next stage of a predictable Nigerian late teens-to-early twenties life. “I saw him learning this very strange language and using strange words, and I was like, what is this?” she says, recalling how she watched her older brother interact with a screen using a vocabulary she could not yet name. Curiosity did the rest. She began learning on Sololearn, working through lessons on her phone until patterns started to make sense. After high school, unsure of what she wanted to do, she decided to see where coding could lead. What began as exposure slowly became direction. She eventually enrolled at Aptech’s Maryland centre in Lagos, a vocational IT training network many young Nigerians turn to for structured tech training, seeking clarity after months of self-study. But structure did not immediately solve the deeper problem. “I was learning these things, but I didn’t know how to translate this into a career,” she says. When the COVID-19 lockdowns began in 2020, and she was back home, the uncertainty became harder to ignore. During that pause, she confronted a harder truth. “I fell into that whole trap of trying to study just enough to pass the exams,” she says. “If I finish from this school today, I will not be able to do anything with this degree that I have.” So she started over. Throughout the pandemic, she returned to self-study with a different metric of progress, working through freeCodeCamp and the Odin Project with a single aim: building real projects. Her days settled into repetition. Learn a concept. Apply it. Debug what failed. Repeat. Breaking into Open Source The pivot to open source was driven by a quiet need to prove she belonged in rooms she was still afraid to enter. When she made her first open-source contribution to Mozilla Firefox, she ran into a version control system she had never used. “It was very difficult for me to understand how it worked,” she says, recalling a three-month stretch in which she struggled to land a single contribution. The code was one challenge. The other was knowing her learning curve was unfolding in public. Mozilla Firefox is not a small project you tinker with quietly. It sits within a vast open-source ecosystem, maintaining thousands of repositories and attracting contributors from across the world. In 2024 alone, public open source projects recorded more than a billion contributions, a reminder of both the scale and visibility of the work. For newcomers, that scale can amplify doubt. Research continues to show that first-time contributors often stall not just because of technical complexity, but because onboarding feels opaque and the social rules are unclear. For a while, she read that friction as a personal deficit. She assumed everyone else was naturally fluent. The shift came in a small exchange. After weeks of struggling, someone responsible for reviewing and merging contributions, known in open source as a maintainer, left a simple comment asking if she needed help. “To anyone else it would have looked normal,” she says, “but to me it felt like someone seeing me.” The tools did not suddenly become easier. What changed was her understanding of the space. Open source was not an elite circle guarding a gate. It was a system sustained by review and response. Once she saw that, the contribution stopped feeling like a test and started feeling like participation. Closing the entry fee in the Public Code By 2023, the scale of Udufo’s work had shifted from her own pull requests to the persistence of others. Through her work as a program organiser for Outreachy, she has helped manage the same pipeline that once unsettled her, coordinating mentors and contributors across time zones and experience levels. Studies across major open source foundations continue to show that mentorship plays a decisive role in whether newcomers remain active. It is not only about learning syntax. It is about understanding how a community functions. She works with that awareness. No beginner, in her view, should spend months stalled on a single pull request because they are too unsure to ask a question. Beyond Outreachy, she has mentored contributors through Google Summer of Code and within communities like ESLint, strengthening both the visible output and the processes that make contribution sustainable. She is equally direct about the economics of participation. GitHub’s 2021 Octoverse estimated that Africa accounted for roughly 2.3% of active contributors worldwide. For her, that gap reflects access more than ability. A reliable laptop, stable electricity, and consistent internet access are significant expenses in Lagos. “The money you’re going to spend on a laptop is a lot,” she says. When contribution workflows assume constant connectivity and modern hardware, the cost of entry rises quietly. She no longer frames her unconventional academic path as a deficit. It was a path shaped by constraint and decision. Today, as a Developer Advocate, her work centres on translation, breaking complex systems into steps someone learning on a mobile device can follow. She wants open-source contributions integrated into Nigerian classrooms so students encounter the industry as part of the curriculum, not by accident. The door she once struggled to open is the one she now keeps in view for others.
