My first Toastmasters role: timekeeper, at one minute's notice
The timekeeper on the agenda couldn't make it, so I stood in at the last minute. What two minutes at the front of the room taught me.
Aniefiok Akpan: Software Engineer. Builder. Learner.
I build software, explore AI, and study how complex systems work. Here I document what I learn, build and break along the way.
Now
What I'm focused on
A running snapshot, updated October 2026.
Building
A billing system that has to be boring to be trusted, and a small agent I use every day.
Learning
Dutch, mostly. Some reading on system design when the commute allows.
Improving
Writing more regularly, and saying less when I am unsure.
Exploring
Whether agents can be made genuinely dependable rather than just impressive.
Latest
Recent entries
Builds, notes and the occasional post-mortem — the short version of what happened.
Ten months of Dutch, honestly assessed
What moved quickly, what has not moved at all, and the practice habits that survive a busy week.
Idempotent consumers, without the ceremony
What actually happens when the same message arrives twice, and the smallest set of changes that makes a consumer safe to retry.
Selected builds
Things I've built
Real builds — what they do, what they run on, and the parts that broke.
RabbitMQ Consumer Test Console
A tool for hitting a message consumer with traffic and watching retries, dead letters and back-pressure in real time.
Found two retry storms before they reached production-like load.
My First AI Agent
An agent that plans and calls tools to finish a job — plus an honest account of where it lost the plot.
Handles the lookup work reliably; a person still checks the answer.
Event-Driven Billing System
Invoices and payments modelled as events, designed so a retry never charges anyone twice.
Engineering
Where the depth lives
Longer notes, references and diagrams on the systems I work with.
AI
Agents, LLMs, RAG and AI architecture — what I build, test and break.
System Design
Distributed systems, databases, messaging, caching and scaling.
Code & Snippets
Working references from Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis and Kubernetes.
Architecture Lab
Full write-ups from problem to trade-offs, with the diagrams to match.
Growth
Growing in public
Two things I'm practising outside of code — with the milestones and the setbacks.
Since 2025
Dutch
From nodding along to holding a conversation. The plateaus, the practice that stuck, and what I still cannot say.
Since 2026
Public speaking
Starting with a five-minute lightning talk and working up. What the nerves do, and what actually helps.
Life
Life, mostly in pictures
Rotterdam, road trips, coffee and the ordinary days in between.
About
Learning, building and documenting along the way.
I'm Aniefiok Akpan, a software engineer in the Netherlands. I build software, explore AI and study how complex systems work — and I keep the notes here: what worked, and what didn't.
Contact
Let's talk
Whether it's engineering, a collaboration, or something you think I should look at — I'd like to hear about it.
Get in touch