Godswill Michael Ukpong

flawed and fabulous.
A picture of me holding a stack of classic books in my workspace at home
him, in the center, looking all flawed and fabulous.

here's a timeline of Godswill's life:

  • 1999 - born in Oworonsoki, Lagos.
  • 2008 - started Junior Secondary School at 8.
  • 2010 - represented his Junior school in a Spelling Bee competition.
  • 2011 - stayed home for 3 months after Junior WAEC doing nothing because his parents couldn't afford his dream technical school - FSTC. he played with all manner of insects in this time, from tracing insects to their queen to catching spiders and building mud houses for them.
  • 2012 - got into senior school at 12, a very young age for high school. receives an award for punctuality in same year.
  • 2014 - wrote WAEC at 14.
  • 2015 - wrote JAMB after staying home again, doing nothing. applied to study Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, but wasn't admitted.
  • 2016 - got his first work experience as a teacher in a nursery school. admitted into the University same year to study Food Science and Technology with a dream to address food shortage, security, availability, and nutritional intake in low-income areas like his
  • 2017 - started his first internship as a Quality Control analyst in a Bottling Water company.
  • 2019 - began his second internship as a chef at the Sheraton Lagos Hotel for 6 months.
  • 2020 - worked a stint in a factory, followed by a laborious stint as a "motor boy". Then a final stint into Affiliate Marketing towards the end of the year that ended badly.
  • 2021 - changed his career trajectory into design. joined his first structured design training in March and another bootcamp in September. authored a design case study on the origin of Egusi soup. started his first official UX Design and UX Writing role in an insurtech startup the following month. over the next year, he crafted the user flows and information architecture for 90% of its products, boosted customers' trust with real-time feedback on their insurance claims tracker, implemented a cohesive voice and tone strategy across its products and developed standardized processes for UX Writing activities for the team.
  • 2022 - receives a B.Tech(Honours) in Food Science and Technology with specialization in Food Processing Technology. started another design role with a product development company, where he was promoted within 3 months due to strong performance and the delivery of high-quality work in good time. he also designed and launched an election monitoring tool for the Nigeria's 2023 Lagos Governorship Elections. later in the year, he his awarded a $7k internship with Outreachy to improve the user experience of tools used by important global organisations such as PATH, the World Mosquito Program, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and many others. he reorganised the visual language and updated the design guidelines for the Open Data Kit Community, ODK-X. he also developed a new naming system to ease communication for over 40 open-source contributors and made it easy for future contributors, irrespective of their tools or software.
  • 2023 - promoted to Lead Product Designer. guided over 5 underrepresented interns to success in different open-source projects in ODK-X. built a comprehensive supply chain and finance management tool for African SMEs.
  • 2024 - registered two companies.

I was thinking of how awesome you were at that moment and I had to let you know. You're still awesome --Anonymous