UK PM Carousel and US-Iran Deals: Why We Build for Chaos

My generator is currently humming a low, stressful tune outside my window here in Gbagada, and my VS Code terminal is throwing a weird SSL error that I’m too tired to debug right now. To distract myself, I skimmed the global news feed.

Keir Starmer is resigning. That makes it six UK prime ministers in ten years. Honestly, that level of turnover is like running a production database on an unstable alpha release of some obscure framework. At the same time, the US and Iran are signing some 60-day peace roadmap in Switzerland.

On paper, this is just international politics. But for those of us writing code and building products in Nigeria, these global swings hit different. They shake up remote contracts, mess with funding pipelines, and turn our currency exchange rates into a rollercoaster. It got me thinking about how we build—both our software architectures and our careers—to survive constant instability.

The Single Point of Failure in Our Careers

Many developers I know are hyper-focused on securing that one fat UK contract or landing a remote gig with a US startup. We treat these opportunities like we’ve made it. But relying on a single foreign market is a massive single point of failure (SPOF).

When a government collapses or changes leadership overnight, immigration policies tighten up, tax codes for foreign contractors get rewritten, and companies freeze hiring. If your entire livelihood is tied to a single country’s economic vibe, you are one policy shift away from a major setback.

As developers, we know better than to build systems with a single database and no failover. We need to apply that same architectural thinking to our careers.

We have to diversify. Don't just look at the UK or US. Look at emerging hubs. Build local products that solve real problems on the ground, even if it's a side hustle. When Sapa hits because a foreign client suddenly paused their external engineering budget, your local, resilient projects can keep you afloat.

Building Code That Expects Errors

In Switzerland, they are celebrating a 60-day roadmap. But on a cold morning in Jos, or amid the chaotic energy of a bus park in Owerri, a 60-day roadmap feels like an eternity. We build for the next sixty minutes.

Our reality forces us to write code that expects failure. If you are building an app for the local market, you can't assume a stable 4G connection. You have to design offline-first architectures. You write sync engines that queue database writes in IndexedDB until a shaky network decides to cooperate.

If one payment gateway goes down—which happens more often than we'd care to admit—your backend needs to automatically failover to a secondary provider without the user even noticing a lag. This isn't just clever engineering; it’s survival.

Our "No gree for anybody" mindset is essentially the human version of a robust try-catch block that retries an API call until it finally gets a 200 OK.

Real Chaos Engineering

Netflix popularized the term "Chaos Monkey"—a tool that randomly shuts down production servers to test system resilience.

Here, we don't need a tool for that. The local power grid, fluctuating internet speeds, and sudden policy shifts do the chaos engineering for us every single day. It makes us tougher, more adaptive engineers.

While devs in more stable environments can afford to write bloated, heavy client-side applications because they assume high bandwidth, we are forced to think about performance, asset optimization, and lightweight payloads.

Global leaders will keep resigning, and international treaties will keep being signed and broken. We can't control any of that. But we can control how resilient we build our systems. Let's make sure our apps—and our careers—can handle the load.

Now, back to debugging this SSL error before the inverter gives up on me.