Software Architecture on Ikwuka Okoye

Building Asteroids with Python and Pygame: From Game Idea to Playable System

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building Asteroids with Python and Pygame: From Game Idea to Playable System

Small games are deceptively useful engineering projects.

They may contain only a few objects on screen, but those objects introduce many of the same problems found in larger software systems: state management, object lifecycles, input handling, timing, rendering, collision detection, and the need to keep individual components understandable as the codebase grows.

The Asteroids project was built as an opportunity to explore those problems through a compact interactive system using Python and Pygame.

Building a Static Site Generator in Python: From Markdown to HTML

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building a Static Site Generator in Python: From Markdown to HTML

A static site generator looks simple from the outside.

You write some Markdown, run a command, and HTML files appear in an output directory.

The interesting engineering work happens between those two points.

Building a static site generator from scratch is a useful exercise because it exposes several concepts that are normally hidden behind frameworks and libraries: parsing, intermediate representations, tree structures, rendering, filesystem operations, and deterministic builds.

Designing OpsPilot: Building a Modular DevOps Operations Toolkit

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Designing OpsPilot: Building a Modular DevOps Operations Toolkit

As backend systems become more complex, the operational work surrounding them becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

Running services, inspecting environments, managing containers, checking infrastructure, and performing repetitive maintenance tasks can quickly turn into a collection of shell commands, scripts, and undocumented procedures.

That was the problem I wanted to explore with OpsPilot.

Rather than building another collection of unrelated scripts, I wanted to create a structured operations toolkit that could grow alongside the systems it manages.

Designing a CLI Architecture for PokedexCLI in Go

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Designing a CLI Architecture for PokedexCLI in Go

Building a command-line application can look deceptively simple.

At first, the requirements for PokedexCLI seem straightforward: accept a command, execute it, call the Pokémon API when necessary, and print the result.

But even a small CLI becomes difficult to maintain when command handling, application state, networking, caching, and presentation logic are allowed to grow together.

For PokedexCLI, I wanted to approach the problem as a real software-engineering exercise rather than simply building a collection of commands that happened to work.

Designing the Architecture of an AI Agent

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Designing the Architecture of an AI Agent

Building an AI agent is very different from building a simple application that sends a prompt to a language model and displays the response.

A useful agent needs to do more than generate text. It needs to interpret a goal, decide what should happen next, use tools when necessary, maintain enough state to complete the task, observe the result, and recover when something goes wrong.

What Building an AI Agent Taught Me About Backend Engineering

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Building an AI Agent Taught Me About Backend Engineering

Building an AI agent initially appears to be an exercise in working with language models.

In practice, much of the work quickly becomes familiar backend engineering.

Requests need validation.

State needs to be managed.

External services need timeouts.

Failures need to be handled.

Operations need to be observable.

Components need clear boundaries.

The language model adds a new dimension, but many of the underlying engineering principles remain the same.

What Building PokedexCLI Taught Me About Backend Engineering in Go

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Building PokedexCLI Taught Me About Backend Engineering in Go

PokedexCLI began as a relatively small Go application.

The premise is simple: interact with Pokémon data through a command-line interface.

But projects do not remain simple merely because their initial requirements are simple.

As functionality grows, the application has to deal with API communication, pagination, application state, caching, command dispatch, data modeling, errors, and testing.

That made PokedexCLI valuable as more than a CLI exercise.