Kelly Daniel

My journey started in early 2020, when I was around 13 turning 14. I was with a friend, and we were talking about ways to make money. He mentioned blogging, that bloggers earn a lot. Before that I used to watch DIY YouTube videos and was fascinated by building things and doing the amazing stuff I saw online. So when he mentioned blogging, I went on YouTube and Google and did some research. I downloaded an app, something like a website creator, and made my first webpage. Then I found Wix and used it to make blogs, but whenever I published one, I'd search the title on Google and never find mine. It was frustrating. I tried Blogger, I tried Blogspot, and figured maybe it was the website builder I was using.

So I started searching how to build a website without code, but one day I thought, okay, what even is this code, let me see what it looks like. I was in JS3 then. In JS2 my teacher had taught us BASIC, but when I got home for the holidays from boarding school, I couldn't replicate it, and I'd heard programming was just 1s and 0s, so I mostly stayed away from code. But when I searched how to build a website with code, I found out they used HTML, and it wasn't as hard as I thought. I went looking for how to learn it, and on YouTube I found a crash course on building a website with HTML and CSS, from a channel I think was called EasyTutorials back then (I think they've since changed their name). Curiosity kept pulling me in. I'd always loved computers, ever since I finally got one in JS1, even though back then I only used it to play games. I ran into plenty of issues learning HTML, but one way or another I scaled through. The detailed version of that story will come one day.

One day on YouTube I found a video on how to build Facebook with PHP, and found out Facebook was actually built with PHP. I got fully immersed, started learning PHP, and set myself a goal: build my own social media. That curiosity carried me into doing whatever it took to chase that goal. I kept adding skills over the years, and I built and rebuilt, trying to get there. A lot happened along the way as life moved, but I kept building.

In 2024 I found myself in Benin Republic, schooling for my university. Life got hard. It's a French-speaking country, I'm not fluent in French, and I didn't know anybody in tech around me, no way to connect with other people. I was juggling school and tech. One day I joined a group called Founders Cabal and found someone in there using the same country phone number as me, in a group full of Nigerians. I DMed him and we talked. A while later he reached out and asked me to join his team. I was really happy about that. It also reminded me of something from a few months earlier: at a cyber cafe I used to go to, someone randomly saw my screen and said, "oh, you use Flutter," and we connected. A few weeks later he gave me my first Flutter gig.

That got me thinking: what if I built an app to help people find others with similar skills around them, since social media targets the whole world but leaves us kind of blind to the people actually near us? I left it as an idea in my head for a while, then a few months later I started building it, and by November 2024 I launched it. It was amazing, a lot of my friends downloaded it, and it helped people find others nearby they didn't even know existed. I was really happy. But since it was a startup and I wasn't too familiar with SaaS and scaling yet, I mostly used it as a project to show clients what I could build and deliver. I kept it running until January 2026, which is around when I started building Calma.

In a lot of ways, my life as a programmer has changed a lot. I've lived a genuinely fun life, connected with random people who turned into close bonds along the way and shaped who I am. For the past six years I've always been building something I felt was needed, or that could be the next big thing. Life, both inside and outside tech, has shaped me, and I'm still moving from being just a developer to someone who actually brings solutions out into the world.