Teaching what I ship.
I was selected as one of the facilitators for the Qubators AI Foundry, the global network's inaugural AI training programme. I teach what I do in production — not demo theatre.
One of the facilitators for the inaugural cohort.
Qubators is a global network of Christian developers building Kingdom technology. The AI Foundry is its flagship training programme. I was honoured to be invited as one of several facilitators teaching the inaugural Cohort 1 — a month of hands-on training across the foundations and applied frontiers of building with AI.
The cohort itself was extraordinary. By graduation, the programme had trained over 500 developers across Africa, with more than 40 live applications launched — covering income-generation, data-driven workflows, agenda-driven tooling, and the promotion of the Espees platform.
The flier here was designed by the organisers as part of the programme's promotional run-up. Read my full reflection on the experience →
What I taught in my sessions
My sessions focused on the part of AI work that's least covered in YouTube tutorials and most consequential in production: how to actually ship an AI feature that survives contact with real users. The themes I came back to:
- Eval-first thinking. Define what "good" looks like before you write a prompt. Without an eval set, you're guessing.
- Grounded answers, not hallucinated ones. The pattern that works in production — retrieval-augmented generation over a known corpus, with citations — and why it's a different discipline from chat-style demos.
- Cost discipline. Prompt caching, model tiering, per-user budgets. Why a feature that costs $50/user/day will kill the business that ships it.
- The boring infrastructure. Logging every API call, replaying broken sessions, alerting on cost spikes — the work that makes the difference between a demo and a product.
The cohort was technically strong, opinionated, and ambitious. I came out of the programme having learned as much from the developers I taught as I taught them — about what early-career African AI engineers are excited to build, and where the gaps in available training material still are.
About the Qubators network
Qubators describes itself as a global network of Christian developers building Kingdom technology — an initiative under Rhapsody of Realities. The AI Foundry sits among the network's broader programmes. For more on the organisation, visit qubators.org.