In 2020, somewhere in Kwara state, an aspiring developer, Ayodele Samuel Adebayo, was on the verge of quitting coding. He had been debugging a React app for two straight nights, and nothing seemed to work. The tutorials were confusing, Stack Overflow threads were vague, and mentors? Nonexistent.
“At some point, I thought maybe tech wasn’t for people like me,” he recalls.
But giving up wasn’t an option for Samuel, who is now a software engineer at Hashnode, one of the world’s leading platforms for developer content and collaboration. Like many Nigerian developers have learned to do, Ayodele had to figure it out the hard way. He read late into the night, broke things, fixed them, broke them again. Then, it clicked. He built his first working project and shared the code online. What happened next would quietly shape his future: people began reaching out for help.
Today, Ayodele isn’t just writing code; he’s building a community. His mission is to mentor and teach 100,000 software engineers worldwide through a mix of online courses, workshops, and one-on-one mentorship.
“I know what it feels like to be stuck,” Ayodele says. “You can have the passion and still lack direction. That’s why mentorship matters, especially in tech.”
From self-taught developer to mentor, Samuel Ayodele found his space, building a new kind of tech movement, a community that teaches, uplifts, and multiplies impact.
From Struggle To Structure
Today, Samuel Ayodele is on a mission to mentor 100,000 software engineers worldwide. The figure isn’t a metric; that’s the bet Samuel is taking with his growing mentorship network. It’s his structured vision built around access, community, and sustainability.
While building and contributing to developer tools and open-source communities at Hashnode, he has seen firsthand how access to mentorship can change a developer’s career trajectory. Now, he is channelling that experience into a global initiative that aims to make structured, scalable mentorship accessible to thousands of aspiring engineers who are learning to code in isolation.
“At Hashnode, I see how shared knowledge can scale beyond borders,” he says. “Mentorship should be the same.”
In practice, he runs mentorship cohorts, teaches through online workshops, and publishes free guides on his blog with famous alias Uncle Bigbay, where thousands of developers learn about everything from version control to building scalable APIs, as well as a YouTube channel, Code With Unclebigbay, where he posts coding tutorials, live project builds and tech-career advice to widen his reach and give developers from all over the world access to his frameworks and mentorship.
The goal is simple but audacious: to make mentorship accessible, structured, and community-driven, and it doesn’t come without its challenges.
Challenges and the Turning Point
Scaling mentorship has not been easy. The early challenges were brutal: unstable internet, burnout, and imposter syndrome. But the vision kept expanding. From small meetups and Telegram groups, Ayodele now runs structured learning programs that help developers move from “tutorial hell” to paid jobs.
When his DMs started flooding with mentorship requests, he realised he couldn’t help everyone personally. The messages kept piling up from developers across Africa asking for help with career guidance, debugging support, and interview preparation.
“I realised I couldn’t keep up one-on-one,” he says. “So I had to build systems that could do that for me.”
That meant documenting his process, turning lessons into reusable frameworks, and training others to become mentors. He created a three-layer model: Learn, Build, and Share. In this structure, every mentee starts by learning, then contributes to collaborative projects, and finally mentors others, creating a self-sustaining chain of learning.
A Different Kind of Vision
What makes Samuel’s perspective unique is his refusal to treat mentorship as charity. For him, it is infrastructure.
“Tech in Africa doesn’t just need more startups,” he says. “It needs stronger foundations, people who know how to build, collaborate, and grow together.”
His approach towards mentorship reframes it from a one-to-one act into a system that can scale exponentially. Every developer he mentors is expected to pass on what they’ve learned. It’s a multiplier model that turns mentorship into an ecosystem rather than a transaction.
Looking Ahead – What’s In The Future?
The plan is simple but bold. Over the next few years, Samuel wants to expand his mentorship model into a full ecosystem. This includes a dedicated learning platform, structured bootcamps, and a network of mentors who can continue the work in their own regions. He calls it a “mentorship chain” where every learner becomes a teacher and every teacher remains a learner.
He is now working on expanding his mentorship programs into a full learning platform that integrates peer-to-peer coaching, project-based learning, and career tracking. He is also building partnerships with tech hubs and universities to bring mentorship into formal education systems.
“I want to see African developers leading global projects, not just contributing to them,” he says. “We already have the talent. We only need the right guidance and opportunities.”
Beyond mentorship, Samuel is investing time in creating digital tools and resources that make self-learning more accessible. His website, unclebigbay, and YouTube page, Code With Unclebigbay, continue to grow into a knowledge hub where aspiring engineers can learn from his experience and from each other.
For Samuel, the mission to mentor 100,000 software engineers is not just a milestone. It is a movement. One that started from a small apartment in Akure with a tired developer, a stubborn laptop, and a single belief that knowledge only matters when it is shared.
