Introduction

The seeds of a software engineer’s mindset were planted at a young age in Ousman, by none other than himself. As a nine year old boy from Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York, he struggled to keep up in class. His mind teemed with questions far beyond the parameters of the uniform approach school system. To others he may have appeared aloof or disinterested, but inside he was overflowing with ideas.

“I had such a hard time in school. I really was super quiet and so my intelligence was always brought into question.”

It’s an image hard to conjure. As now, Ousman couldn’t be more forthcoming with his thoughts, giving the immediate impression of a self-effacing confidence in himself, while speaking eloquently about his past struggles and present successes.

“I wasn't a troublesome kid, I was just mentally… in my own world. I was always so curious, but I just couldn't be satisfied in class because information didn't come the way I needed it to.”

This failure to connect in school led Ousman to look for answers to burning questions independently. And it was this response to a childhood challenge where he began developing the autonomy that would later define his character and serve him well as a coder. 

“I struggled when I was young, and so I had to take my education into my own hands. I had to learn how to learn.”

However, the clash of curiosity about the world and fear of financial insecurity in Ousman created an internal dichotomy between his desire to explore his interests and the need to ensure a stable future for himself.

Although born in the US, Ousman’s upbringing would have been radically different were it not for an impending civil war in his parent’s home nation of Liberia in the 90s. Left with the decision to risk life in a war torn nation or to uproot the family, they chose the latter. 

But the comfortable life they had worked for in Liberia could not be replicated in the USA.

“So many of the issues I faced as that struggling kid stemmed from growing up in a very financially insecure household and being in a constant fight or flight mode.

“I don’t know about anyone else, but I would have loved to have grown up rich!” He laughs amiably, brushing off any signs of self-pity and embracing his story.

“But, as it was, I grew up in one of the rougher parts of New York City as a child of immigrants from West Africa. Whether you realize it or not, you are always chasing financial security.”

This chase led him to study a more practical subject at university, where he achieved a bachelor’s degree in Computer and Information Science from Syracuse University. 

Although, following this he relented to his curious, more artistic side to follow his passion for photography and “ended up studying a mix of photojournalism with studio and fine art work.”

Photography was his priority after graduation and he achieved great success in commercial photography. 

“I don’t wanna sound obnoxious,” which it would be hard to accuse him of, “but if you throw out a name, I probably worked with them.” 

Not one to name drop himself, a quick search of his impressive portfolio of work throws up some of his collaborations, which include productions with Bacardi, Reebok, LeBron James, Travis Scott, and even a big project with Microsoft.

However, Ousman never comes across as someone satisfied with their success. Always learning, looking and searching for that next stage of his personal development, he could sense the winds of change. 

Between 2016 to 2017, while devouring books on the future of artificial intelligence, he realized the incoming technological tsunami could see him and other artists unseated by innovations in computer sciences.

It was his return to this discipline, learning how to teach himself programming languages and about systems, that helped him achieve the security he had pursued in life since growing up from that boy daydreaming in school. And it was coding for AppOmni where he cut his teeth professionally.

“ People think of engineers as people who write code. But it’s so much more than that, it’s important not only to see yourself as an engineer, but as a steward of the product”

AppOmni is a cybersecurity monitoring tool where Ousman now works as a UI engineer specializing in Javascript, Typescript, and Vue.js and the front end ecosystem.

According to the company, who have spearheaded SaaS ecosystem security since being founded in 2018, over 20% of Fortune 100 companies have given AppOmni their seal of approval.

“It's such a great, not to mention modern problem that we’re solving. Back in the 2000s we had things like McAfee antivirus software, but of course we don’t use it anymore because we’re not cavemen. 

“McAfee would trawl your local computer searching for malicious things and alert you to them. AppOmni does the same thing. Except instead of traversing your machine, we’re scraping your entire SaaS ecosystem.”

Ousman emphasizes these last three words, giving the concept the magnitude it deserves. Work like his at AppOmni is what keeps businesses and people safe from the ravages of the internet and the modern bandits always looking for ways to exploit it. 

Everyone has a SaaS ecosystem. Zoom, Google Meet, Dropbox, and Teams are all SaaS platforms. They are connection points from users to the internet which technologically savvy people can manipulate security weaknesses in to gain access to your personal information at these SaaS vector points. 

“Essentially, the work I’m doing is to help create a thick layer of security around all of your SaaS applications to protect you from any bad actors that wanna steal your info, and take advantage of you, your business, you name it.”

Ousman’s approach to working on the product is predominantly to understand how he personally can contribute to it, as an engineer but also an artist, relying on his long term vision for the final product.

“To be a great software engineer, you have to see yourself from the perspective of the product’s end user. And to be a competitive business, we need to make sure our customers are as happy with the product as they can be.

“People think of engineers as people who write code for a company. But it’s so much more than that, it’s important not only to see yourself as an engineer, as a programmer, a coder, but as a steward of the product.

“I’m not just writing code, I’m really trying to think about my end user’s pain points. Their desires for the product, and then I’m allowing that to feed into how I develop its features.”

Ousman works on feature development as part of a wider team consisting of a back-end engineer working on the infrastructure of the feature, a designer who explains to the team how the feature is going to look, and himself, who implements that design. While their product director orchestrates the overall vision and direction that his team engineers towards.

“I like to think of our team as a small battalion in an army that can build whatever feature is necessary. We have our lieutenant, the generals and the soldiers. We are a small pod but, if you give us an ambiguous problem to solve, we will solve it.”

Recently, his team built a new feature called Insights. Insights alerts AppOmni’s users to security issues that they may not be aware of yet, as well as other information that can help them achieve greater security.

“As our product is a security product, typically the people using it are security experts. However, so are we, and we know a little more than our customers. 

In addition, Ousman played a key role in helping to rebuild AppOmni's onboarding flow and dashboard, a significant milestone, as it is an integral part of every user's integration within the AppOmni ecosystem. 

The redesigned flow has successfully reduced customer complexity as they embark on their journey with AppOmni. With a clean and simple interface, the user is seamlessly guided through connecting their first SaaS applications, enhancing their overall experience and making the onboarding process smoother."

“The largest challenge here for me wasn’t building the code, but structuring out what the end result should be, and then rolling that out in a way that makes sense to the user. The questions I ask myself are things like - am I building the right product? Are we getting the necessary feedback from the user? And are we building in the right direction?”

He explains that a big concern for software engineers is not having a clear end destination for what is being built, and that often coders find they have spent months working on something in the wrong direction, wasting resources and forcing them to start again.

AppOmni’s clients are a mixture of companies, all with different security concerns and needs, and include Dropbox, RightMove and the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Building a feature like Insights that works for the range of customers AppOmni serves is a major challenge.

“For this we leverage the experience of our internal experts who synthesize all these different data ecosystems and then we spit out one unified view to our end user. 

“I don't have to be an expert on so many different arenas of the SaaS ecosystem, but I do need to be an expert in making sure the end product comes together and makes sense as a consolidated outlook.”

To accomplish this, he relies on his inclination to begin with the end in mind, a trait that may have been influenced by his background in the arts.

“ I felt a cognitive dissonance in that I was becoming successful in a craft I suspected may not stand the test of time”

The Transition From Artist to Engineer

Even as he was achieving success as an artist, curiosity about the world still pushed Ousman to ask questions with his personal artwork. The sophisticated, almost academically inquisitive nature of his art could even see it classed as Epistemological Art. Art as a philosophical inquiry.

“I always had this investigative mind and so on the side I would publish my own projects, my investigations as I saw them, and I won some pretty prestigious awards.”

Fuelled by his reading on AI, it was these visual investigations, asking questions about the future of humanity and society, that drew him to the then still nascent topic of artificial intelligence.

“In around 2017, I started reading a lot of books about AI, which is huge now, but back then it wasn't something most people talked about, let alone even considered an issue. It was pretty obvious to me that there was going to be an acceleration in the technological field. And that AI would change the world as we know it.”

“Given the success I was building in photography, I felt a cognitive dissonance in that I was becoming successful in something I suspected may not stand the test of time.”

However, rather than let this dishearten him, Ousman instead allowed it to influence the direction of both his career and himself as an individual.

Leaning on his childhood experience of autodidactism, when the day’s photography work came to an end, his programming self studies would begin. While traveling and working with different industries and brands, he would spend his nights reading and absorbing Python and Javascript. 

The people around him at the time questioned the use of his free time on learning an “obscure” thing like programming languages. However, well-used to people misunderstanding him and his interests from his early days at school, he was undeterred by other people’s bewilderment at his use of time.

“I used to say to them ‘I think code is going to be really important soon’, and I taught myself for about a year, going deeper and deeper into the technological rabbit hole. I was looking into data science, machine learning and programming in general. 

“But, I found that one of the best ways to immerse myself in this world was to either work for a company doing programming, or do a bootcamp. 

“After researching, Codesmith stood out as the most advantageous immersion course for the future I wanted, particularly with its work on Javascript. People were saying back then that Javascript was going to eat the world one day.”

He wanted to be ahead of the curve on Javascript and programming, and so began the move from full time photographer to immersive engineering student at Codesmith, who he credits with “instilling the essential engineering values deeply.”

However, rather than divert Ousman’s attentions, Codesmith and the career in coding they provided him with has empowered Ousman. By fusing the two sides of his character, the engineer and the artist, Ousman underwent a kind of renascence that has allowed him to express his true self, uninhibited by doubt.

His artist’s understanding of creating something with the end view in mind has aided him as a front-end engineer, while engineering has given him the deep mental models to understand how things work and to ask the right questions, alongside the financial stability to also pursue his art in a meaningful way.

“One of the best things about my career in engineering is that it has genuinely taken away that feeling of insecurity that followed me. I have become financially stable and, for immigrant parents, that's one of the true hallmarks of success.”