Written by: Emmanuel Okumuye
In 2020, While the startup world in Africa was buzzing with fintech and e-commerce, a small engineering team from Nigeria was working on something different: the creation of West Africa’s first no-code platform. One of the significant technical contributors to this effort was Samuel Bankole, a young software engineer who would go on to be one of the key software developers of Quabbly, a Saas platform to make software development easily accessible to non-technical users. At a time when most businesses were still using a business developer to develop their software tools, Quabbly had a new idea: How can businesses create their own software tools without the assistance of a business developer or any code being written?
The concept was groundbreaking particularly in the African region where technological and connectivity limitations, diverse business requirements, and other obstacles impeded the uptake of software among SMEs. However, the founders of Quabbly thought there was a space for a platform that could make workflow automation and creating and using internal software for African businesses simpler.
Bankole joined the startup as a founding front end engineer, bringing a vision to fruition. Quabbly was designed to be a flexible no-code workspace that businesses could use to build and automate their workflows, and manage their day-to-day operations, visualize the data, and share the data with other members of their organization without having to hire on-board engineers. The company found itself on the same boat as other global productivity tools like Airtable, Monday.com and ClickUp, but with a greater commitment to accessibility and adaptability, and business realities in emerging markets.
When it comes to the evolution of the platform, One of the founders, David Ogbonna Eze explained that the needs of African customers were very different from the needs of the Western markets. Existing no-code systems were not easy to replicate and expect them to work locally and be simple and cheap. That was one of the defining engineering problems that the team had to address.
Quabbly was not only enterprise software, but a canvas for businesses to work on and develop their systems. It might be enhanced for project administration, healthcare data management, school administration, construction workflows, CRM, and internal data administration.
However, this flexibility added to complexity. Implementing a platform that would be capable of handling complex use cases and still be user friendly for non-technical people requires tremendous innovation in the front end engineering. Much of that was done by Bankole, who developed scalable frontend systems built with Vue.js and TypeScript, and supervises over a team of over 5 engineers tasked with building and maintaining the platform’s user experience.
One of the most significant challenges for one of the team was to make the “blank canvas” experience easy for users who are not very tech savvy. The problem wasn’t just building features, but creating software that is easy to use for the typical business owner, administrator, school, and operation team.
With Bankole leading the engineering team, Quabbly enabled users to create custom workflows, automate repetitive tasks, visualize operational data with Kanban boards, tables, maps, charts and calendars, and integrate external services such as Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, LinkedIn, and Mailchimp directly into their workflows. It also added dashboards that allowed businesses to access analytics, as well as summarise their operational activities from a centralised interface and manage their high priority workflows.
Accessibility was vital for mobile-first African teams, too. Quabbly introduced a mobile app which allowed users to handle workflows, talk to team members and access operational boards while they’re out on the go managing activities via Android devices. The idea of scalability and engineering efficiency was paramount for Bankole in the background.
He has contributed to the development of automated CI/CD pipelines that reduced the deployment time by 60%, end-to-end testing strategies that reduced regression issues by 70%, and infrastructure optimization initiatives that reduced technological operational costs by 15%. In addition to the technical work, he also helped train young engineers, review code, and ran in-house engineering schools and implemented systems that increased development’s consistency throughout the company.
As Quabbly grew from an experimental African start-up to a fully SaaS platform that could be accessed worldwide, those contributions became imperative.
The company’s vision soon garnered investor enthusiasm. Quabbly has attracted investors to its early-stage, partnering with Ben Tossell and investment firm Oui Capital to help establish investor trust in productivity infrastructure products developed by Africans.
Quabbly was more than just another job for Bankole. It became a proving ground for the creation of technology products that are competitive on the global stage from Africa.
This experience has influenced Bankole’s engineering career and how he tackles difficult tasks and works with a variety of international teams. After Quabbly, Bankole took a leap to Chatway where he joined as a frontend developer on a Premio messaging platform utilized by over 40,000 organizations in over 20 nations. Bankole is additionally a Co-Founder of Diatron Well being, a well being tech startup that creates AI-powered well being methods and behavioral science for ongoing illness administration.
Bankole is a rising star in the tech industry, he has won multiple awards, such as Emerging Frontend Developer of the Year at Nigeria Technology Awards, 2023 and Rising Leader in Frontend Engineering and Innovation at Titans of Tech Awards, 2024. However, the most significant part of Bankole’s narrative is the fact that it’s a story about the ability of African engineers.
Bankole’s work reflects a growing generation of African engineers quietly building globally relevant systems from within the continent.
And as no-code platforms, AI systems, and workflow automation tools continue reshaping how businesses operate worldwide, the engineers who helped pioneer those systems early in Africa may ultimately prove to be among the ecosystem’s most important builders.
