I’m Tayaza Fadason. I started out in a microbiology lab in Jos, Nigeria, and somewhere between the petri dishes I fell for programming. That detour took me through bioinformatics in the UK and a PhD in Auckland, where I spent years asking why some diseases keep turning up together in the same people. The answer was hiding in how DNA folds: parts of the genome that look far apart are, in fact, touching.
Here is what that taught me. Most messy systems are not as random as they look; the connections are there, we just haven’t mapped them yet. A savings circle, a marketer’s media plan, a tailor’s notebook of measurements: each is a system people already run and trust. My work is to map the real connections and put them in software people actually use.
Today I lead technology at Together in Auckland, and I’m building Saving Mates, a ledger for savings circles like ajo, esusu and stokvels. Same lesson, new soil.
