Minna, Niger State, Nigeria · Digital Nigeria Honours 2026 (Under 35)
I build infrastructure, and I train the people who run it, from Minna.
I’m a cloud and infrastructure engineer and a Google Developer Expert in Cloud. From 2021 to 2025 I was the only infrastructure engineer at KnowNow Africa, a production SaaS company, and in the same years I started the cloud native and Go communities in Minna, Nigeria.
In my NYSC year I went back to the Federal University of Technology, Minna, where I studied, and built a cloud lab so that a student’s laptop no longer decides who can do the lab work.
This page is the short version, hosted live at dnh.taiwrash.xyz. Each entry has a link to a public page you can check. Papers, event pages and speaker profiles list me as Rasheed Mudasiru.
- 100K+students & professionals encountered and trained over 5+ years
- 500+students reached through SWEMLAB across 5+ courses
- 593members in Cloud Native Minna (238) and Go Minna (355)
- 4tools shipped, 2 merged ArgoCD PRs, 2 papers and 1 open dataset
In brief
How the work lines up with the criteria for Young Digital Leader of the Year. Each line links to the evidence below.
- Impact for my career stage
- As a student I grew GDSC FUT Minna from ~300 to 700+ members, was named to the MLH Top 50 and started Cloud Native Minna and Go Developers Network Minna. From 2021 to 2025 I ran production cloud infrastructure at KnowNow Africa (winner of the 2023 NCC ₦10M Hackathon), then returned to FUT Minna for NYSC to build SWEMLAB for 500+ students and train lecturers to run it without me. SWEMLAB · Student years
- Innovation
- agrepl replays AI agent runs offline (98.3% median latency reduction in my arXiv paper). Trigra brings GitOps to small clusters. Almag signs CI release decisions. W2P predicts crop planting windows for smallholder farmers. Two pull requests merged into CNCF’s ArgoCD. Build
- Leadership
- I founded and lead Cloud Native Minna (238 members, 23 events) and Go Developers Network Minna (355 members), delivered the opening keynote at GitHub Field Day Abuja, co-organised KCD Nigeria, and started InfraConf Africa through TheInfra (TAQ Limited). Gather
- Measurable outcomes
- Over 100,000 students and professionals encountered and trained across 5+ years of lectures, community workshops, bootcamps and conferences; 400+ students taught across five degree programmes at FUT Minna; 500+ reached on SWEMLAB across 5+ courses; 20 student teams shipped projects (16 deployed live); 8.4/10 average student recommendation score (n = 34). Teach · Speak
- Relevance to Nigeria
- I build for low bandwidth, old laptops and tight budgets, consult on FUT Minna’s Blockchain Master’s curriculum and departmental lab accreditation, speak at the 3MTT (3 Million Technical Talent) Niger State Fellow Conference, and train engineers across north-central, north-eastern and south-western Nigeria (Minna, Abuja, Lokoja, Egbe, Maiduguri, Ogbomoso, Oyo and Lagos). Speak
- What comes next
- InfraConf Africa runs online on 21 Nov 2026 and in person in Lagos in Nov 2027, alongside a student research group (IESRG) and ongoing research on resource-efficient AI infrastructure. Next
Build
Tools and research for teams that have little bandwidth, memory or budget.
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Mar 2021 to Jul 2025Sole infrastructure engineer, KnowNow Africa Limited (NCC ₦10M Hackathon Winner)
Ran the full AWS and GCP stack of a production SaaS product for four years, with no second engineer: Kubernetes (EKS and GKE), databases, CI/CD and monitoring. Cut release cycle time by 40% with GitHub Actions and Jenkins pipelines, managed the infrastructure in Terraform, and built the Prometheus and Grafana monitoring from scratch. In October 2023, our blockchain- and machine-learning-powered regulatory compliance and fraud-detection solution won first place (₦10 million prize, selected from 81 entries) in the Blockchain category of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Talent Hunt Research through Hackathon in Abuja.
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Open source, Go, MIT licenceagrepl
Records the traffic between an AI agent and its LLM and API providers, then replays the run offline with no network calls. A failing run can be shared, and a teammate reproduces the same failure without paying for new API calls.
The agrepl project site, with the record step in the terminal demo. -
arXiv:2607.16200, sole author, Apr 2026Deterministic Replay for AI Agent Systems
Replay fidelity of 1.0 and a median per-step latency reduction of 98.3% across five workloads and 250 replay instances. Follow-on work on continuous-integration checks for LLM output drift (Gating Nondeterminism: A Continuous Integration Check for LLM Output Drift) was accepted to the LiveWrite 2026 workshop at the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2026, Munich).
The arXiv abstract page: submitted 30 Apr 2026, filed under Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI). -
Launched Jan 2026Trigra & upstream CNCF ArgoCD contributions
A GitOps controller written in Go that talks to the Kubernetes API directly. It is aimed at small and edge clusters where heavier controllers use too much memory. Alongside building Trigra, I contributed two merged documentation pull requests to ArgoCD, the CNCF graduated GitOps project.
How Trigra works, from the repository README: push to Git, webhook to Trigra, manifests applied to Kubernetes. -
CI security
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Aug 2026 and open dataSpeech separation for forensic audio
Co-authored a peer-reviewed paper, Deep learning-based multi-speaker separation and speech enhancement for forensic audio analysis, in the Nature Journal of Emerging Sciences, Technologies and Innovations (Vol. 10 No. 5, 2026). I also released the open 63-minute multi-speaker speech dataset behind it under the MIT licence on OpenSLR.
The article page, published 27 Aug 2026. -
Applied AI prototypesW2P (When & What to Plant) and ShikkanAI
W2P is an agricultural intelligence web app built for the BeOrchid Africa Developers Hackathon 2026 that combines LSTM rainfall-stability forecasting and Random Forest crop-suitability models to give smallholder farmers planting windows and germination risk scores. ShikkanAI is an AI-assisted MRI analysis prototype (brain, kidney and abdomen scans) that won a ₦2 million hackathon prize.
The W2P web application at taiwrash.github.io/w2p.
Teach
At the Federal University of Technology, Minna, where I studied.
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Nov 2025 to Nov 2026, NYSCEmerging Technology Lab Instructor & Departmental Support
Lab instructor and teaching assistant in the Department of Software Engineering during my NYSC year. I taught the second-year course FUTM-SWE-221 and supported curriculum, research and accreditation work across the School of ICT.
- Taught Introduction to Software Engineering to 400+ students across five programmes (Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information and Media Science, Cyber Security, and Information Technology) and graded 400+ course workbooks
- Guided 80+ individual-project students through problem definition, PRDs and delivery, wrote 30+ project guides introducing real REST APIs, and judged 20+ student software projects
- Delegated to the Department of Artificial Intelligence (Apr 2026) to set up its operational AI/ML lab (Anaconda, NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, Matplotlib, Seaborn, SciPy and Jupyter) and validated it with an end-to-end Iris classification workflow
- Provided technical consultancy for the Blockchain Master’s Programme at the Centre for Emerging Technologies, FUT Minna, and collaborated with faculty on research manuscripts
- Supported Software Engineering accreditation lab verification, drafted the department’s 2025 Annual Report for the University Senate, prepared 100-level orientation materials for the HOD, drafted Application Packages course content, and built and donated two wooden storage cabinets for departmental records
FUTM-SWE-221 project defences: 20 student teams showed working software to a panel of lecturers.
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500+ students, 5+ coursesSWEMLAB
A cloud-native software engineering laboratory (Go/Gin backend, PostgreSQL, React/Vite frontend) that gives every student the same pre-configured browser environment via GitHub Codespaces, so a student’s laptop no longer decides who can do the lab work. SWEMLAB integrates the Gemini API to turn syllabus outlines into structured lab instructions, devcontainer definitions and GitHub Actions autograding workflows, and provisions all repositories under a centralized departmental GitHub organisation (
software-engineering-futminna) with an automated fork-based migration pipeline that preserves commit history for accreditation review.Reached 500+ students across 5+ courses (Software Engineering, Individual Software Project I, Ethical Hacking and Computer Programming) and 3+ instructors. In the FUTM-SWE-221 cohort, 20 student teams (80 enrolled students) built and defended open-source systems, 16 of them deployed live.
What 34 students said in the anonymous SWEMLAB impact survey (June to August 2026):
- 8.4 out of 10 average likelihood of recommending SWEMLAB to another student; 31 of 34 gave 7 or higher (94% gave 6 or higher)
- 76% rated the platform intuitive and easy to navigate (4 or 5 out of 5)
- 7.3 out of 10 average confidence in applying software engineering and GitHub workflows
- Student comments: “My favorite feature is the project collaboration where students can work together on one project” · “Helped me understand UML better from SEN 201” · “It taught me how to use GitHub”
The SWEMLAB student control center for weekly SEN201 activities.
The SWEMLAB Collaborative Team Hub, showing academic integrity rules and one of the 21 real-world API project briefs (NaijaWeather).
The public FUTM-SWE-221 student showcase. -
Oct 2026
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Degree & university awardsB.Tech Computer Science, First Class Honours (FUT Minna)
CGPA 4.63 out of 5.0 (4.82 final-year GPA, top 2% of cohort). Recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation Award and the Dean’s Academic Award; final-year machine-learning and Ethereum-testnet fraud-detection thesis earned Grade A and external funding prior to submission.
Gather
Communities and events that put cloud native, Go and AI skills within reach in north-central Nigeria and beyond.
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Since Jan 2022, 593 members across 2 groupsCloud Native Minna (238 members) & Go Developers Network Minna (355 members)
Founded and lead both communities in Minna. Cloud Native Minna (an official Linux Foundation / CNCF community group) has run 23 public events since January 2022, from Linux automation and Kubernetes study sessions to Hacktoberfest and Dev Days Minna in 2026. Go Developers Network Minna brings together 355 local Golang developers on Meetup.
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9 Sep 2023
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9 Nov 2024 & 23 Nov 2024GitHub Field Day Abuja & GitHub Field Day Rwanda (Kigali)
At GitHub Field Day Abuja (hosted by GitHub Education at Cafe One Abuja for student community leaders across north-central Nigeria), I delivered the opening keynote (Welcome & Keynote Speech by Rasheed) and led the closing evaluation session (Evaluating the Event Goals with Rasheed). Later that month, GitHub Education sponsored my participation as a GitHub Campus Expert delegate at GitHub Field Day Rwanda at AmaliTech in Kigali.
GitHub Field Day Abuja schedule/Abuja photo album (274 photos)/Kigali photo album (300 photos)/Campus Expert profileGitHub Field Day Abuja (Nov 2024), and with fellow Campus Experts at AmaliTech in Kigali, Rwanda (Nov 2024).
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2024 to 2026, Minna & OyoBuild Open Source with AI, Supabase Launch Weeks (LW14 & LW15), VS Code Dev Day, AI on Terminal & L2B4B
Organised and hosted hands-on community workshops connecting students and developers in Minna and Oyo State to open-source, cloud and AI tooling:
- AI on Terminal: CLI for Developers (17 Jun 2026, School Library, FUT Minna)
- GitHub Copilot Dev Days: Empowering Your Code with AI (22 Apr 2026, Minna)
- VS Code Dev Day Minna 2025 (20 Sep 2025, FUT Minna)
- Supabase Launch Week 15 (LW15) Minna Meetup (23 Jul 2025, FUT Minna)
- Build Open Source with AI (30 Apr 2025, Window on America, FUT Minna — 103 attendees on Luma)
- Supabase Launch Week 14 (LW14) Meetups in Minna (5 Apr 2025, NITDA IT Hub, FUT Minna) and Oyo (12 Apr 2025)
- Learn to Build for Business (L2B4B) (28–31 Aug 2024, Window on America, FUT Minna)
Build Open Source with AI (103 went)/Build Open Source album/AI on Terminal page/AI on Terminal album/Copilot Dev Days (Apr 2026)/Apr 2026 album (300 photos)/VS Code Dev Day page/VS Code Dev Day album/Supabase LW15 Minna album/LW14 Minna page/LW14 Minna album/LW14 Oyo album/L2B4B page/L2B4B albumHosting Build Open Source with AI (30 Apr 2025) and VS Code Dev Day Minna (20 Sep 2025).
Leading the Supabase LW15 Meetup in Minna (Jul 2025), and the Supabase LW14 group at the NITDA IT Hub, FUT Minna (Apr 2025).
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6 Aug 2025
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28 Oct 2026GitHub Copilot Dev Days, Minna
Hosted Dev Days Minna through Cloud Native Minna at FUT Minna, part of the global GitHub Copilot Dev Days series. Participants worked through a hands-on GitHub Copilot CLI track.
Dev Days Minna, 28 Oct 2026: the room, and the Copilot CLI track on screen.
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14 Aug 2025Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria
Co-organiser. 270 RSVPs on the event page.
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21 Nov 2026, free and onlineInfraConf Africa
I started InfraConf Africa, a conference for platform and infrastructure engineers. It has six tracks, including one on building for low-bandwidth, high-latency environments, and is run by TheInfra, a community initiative of my company, TAQ Limited. An in-person Lagos edition is planned for 20 Nov 2027.
InfraConf Africa 2026: virtual, 21 Nov 2026, free to attend.
Speak
Over the last 5+ years I have encountered and trained more than 100,000 students and professionals across university lectures, national and international conferences, community bootcamps and hands-on workshops across Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda. RSVP counts and photo albums are linked below.
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DevFest, Oct 2026Maiduguri and Minna
- DevFest Maiduguri, 24 Oct 2026, Borno State Hotel, 526 RSVPs
- DevFest Minna, 16 to 17 Oct 2026 (Day 1 Hands-on Workshops & Day 2 Main Conference), Abdulkadir Kure University, 308 RSVPs
DevFest Maiduguri 2026/Maiduguri album (203 photos)/DevFest Minna 2026/Minna Day 1 album/Minna Day 2 albumOn stage at DevFest Maiduguri 2026, and at DevFest Minna 2026.
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Feb to Jul 2026, MinnaBuild with AI: I/O Extended Minna, Build with AI FUTMinna, AWS Student Community Day & IWD Cloud Minna
Led hands-on AI and cloud sessions across Minna in 2026: Build with AI: I/O Extended Minna at the NITDA IT Hub hall, FUT Minna (17 Jul 2026, 170 RSVPs), Build With AI FUTMinna (Preseries) (Apr 2026), International Women’s Day (IWD) Cloud Minna (Apr 2026), and AWS Student Community Day Minna (Mar 2026).
I/O Extended Minna page/I/O Extended album/BwAI FUTMinna 2026 album/AWS Student Community Day album (294 photos)/IWD Cloud Minna page/IWD Cloud Minna albumRunning the session, and the room at the NITDA IT Hub hall, FUT Minna (17 Jul 2026).
With student participants after the Build With AI FUTMinna 2026 session. -
Aug 2025, Johannesburg & LagosAWS Summit Johannesburg & Open Source Festival (OSCAFEST) Lagos
At AWS Summit Johannesburg (20 Aug 2025, Sandton, South Africa), my talk Supercharge DevOps Automation with Amazon Bedrock and Go was selected as one of seven Community Lounge Dev Talks. At OSCAFEST 2025 in Lagos, I spoke on Building a Self-Managed Kubernetes Experience with kubectl-ai and joined the main-stage panel on open-source sustainability, cloud tooling and community development.
Speaking in the Community Lounge at AWS Summit Johannesburg (Aug 2025), and on stage at OSCAFEST Lagos (Aug 2025).
On the main-stage panel at Open Source Festival (OSCAFEST) 2025, Lagos. -
DjangoCon & UbuCon Africa, Aug 2025DevOps Pipeline for Django Applications (Arusha, Tanzania)
A 30-minute Main Hall talk in Arusha, Tanzania on how to automate, scale and secure Django deployments.
On stage at DjangoCon & UbuCon Africa in Arusha, Tanzania, and the Pretalx speaker page.
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DevFest, Nov to Dec 2025Minna, Lokoja, Maiduguri and Ogbomoso
- DevFest Minna, 8 Nov 2025, 412 RSVPs
- DevFest Lokoja, 21 Nov 2025, Kogi State
- DevFest Maiduguri, 22 Nov 2025, 1,100 RSVPs
- DevFest Ogbomoso, 6 Dec 2025, 720 RSVPs (Gemma: Inferences and building a MaaS; also ran the Dec 2024 workshop on building MaaS with Gemini & Gemma)
DevFest Minna/Minna 2025 album/DevFest Lokoja 2025 album (301 photos)/DevFest Maiduguri/DevFest Ogbomoso/Ogbomoso 2025 albumSpeaking on stage at DevFest Ogbomoso 2025, and the official speaker card.
The DevFest Minna 2025 event page (412 RSVPs). -
2024 to 2025, Minna, Egbe & AbujaBuild with AI (Minna, FUTMinna & Egbe), Google I/O Extended (Abuja & Minna), IILHUB x CcHub, DDC Minna & Experience AI
In Egbe, Kogi State, I spoke on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on 17 May 2025. In Minna and Abuja I led hands-on workshops across Build with AI Minna (10 May 2025, 116 RSVPs, covering Google AI Studio, Firebase Studio and Gemini in DevOps workflows), Build With AI FUTMinna (26 Jul 2025), IILHUB x CcHub Innovation Challenge & Hackathon Minna (25 Jul 2025), Daytona Developers Club (DDC) Minna (22 Feb 2025), Experience AI (Oct 2024), GDG Abuja I/O Extended (27 Jul 2024) and Google I/O Extended Minna (22 Jun 2024).
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May 2024, Niger State3MTT (3 Million Technical Talent) Niger State Fellow Conference
Invited speaker and panellist at the NITDA / IHS Towers 3MTT Niger State Fellow Conference in Minna, addressing fellows on software engineering, cloud infrastructure and building technical careers in Nigeria.
Speaking on the stage panel at the 3MTT Niger State Fellow Conference, and in the group photo with fellows (front row, second from right).
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Gemini Hack FUTMinnaHackathon talk
Spoke to the participants at Gemini Hack FUTMinna, a student hackathon at FUT Minna.
Speaking at Gemini Hack FUTMinna, and the room with the countdown on screen.
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2024 to 2025, Lagos & NairobiGopherCon Africa, Africa DevOps Summit & NGM Conference
- GopherCon Africa 2025 (Oct 2025, The Zone, Lagos): Go Systems, Concurrency & Microservices in Production
- NGM Conference 4.0 (4 Oct 2025, Ikeja, Lagos): Smart Work, Not Hard Work: Harnessing AI Tools to Excel
- Africa DevOps Summit 2024 (Oct 2024, Nairobi, Kenya): LLMs For Everything DevOps: Real-World Infrastructure
- GopherCon Africa 2024 (Oct 2024, Nairobi, Kenya): Building a Local Go Community as a Student / Developer
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Microsoft DevConnect & TEDxTAUMicrosoft Reactor Lagos (Feb 2025) & TEDxTAU (Nov 2023)
Delivered a lightning talk on AI, cloud and open-source developer tools at Microsoft DevConnect, and spoke at TEDxTAU (Thomas Adewumi University, Kwara State, 8 Nov 2023) on The Danger of Premature Clarity: Engineering Trajectories.
Recognition
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Programmes & certifications
Google Developer Expert in Cloud. AWS Community Builder. GitHub Campus Expert for more than five years. Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador (Beta). Linux Foundation Certified Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA). I mentor engineers across Africa through the Linux Foundation and Andela Africa Kubernetes programme.
My Sessionize speaker profile, and my CNCF Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certificate (credential ID redacted).
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As a student, FUT Minna
Led the Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) at FUT Minna and grew membership from ~300 to 700+ active students across two campuses, served as an AWS Educate Student Ambassador and FSI Campus Ambassador Lead (receiving the 2023 FSI Community Award), and became a GitHub Campus Expert. I started Cloud Native Minna and Go Developers Network Minna while still an undergraduate, and in 2023 I spoke at and organised Go and Kubernetes Day.
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2021 & 2023
Next
Plans that are under way, not finished work.
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21 Nov 2026, then 2027InfraConf Africa
The first edition runs online on 21 Nov 2026. The second is planned in person in Lagos on 20 Nov 2027.
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ResearchIntelligence and Emerging Systems Research Group (IESRG)
A student research group I’m building, and my own research on resource-efficient AI infrastructure, distributed systems and cloud-native systems that work under real-world limits.
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FUT MinnaSWEMLAB after my service year
Department staff have been trained to run SWEMLAB, student projects live in a departmental GitHub organisation, and the platform stays in use for coming cohorts.






























