Prologue

Some stories begin in libraries, others in the quiet corners of childhood bedrooms. Mine began in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, with a copy of Jane Eyre. Qazim, the subject of this blog post, began with books pressed into his hands by his mother and his reluctant habit of hiding Supa Strikas comics inside their pages. Years later, those moments, my first purchase, his first defiance, still shape the way we both lose ourselves in books. This is the story of how reading carries us, and how it folds into the work Qazim now does as an engineer at Moniepoint.

PART 1

So Book Lovers Day happened on the 9th, and the literati celebrated with many interesting books. For DreamMakers, it was marked in small, personal ways: slipping in an extra page of their current read, wandering into a bookstore to pick up a book that cleanses their reading palette, or just standing in front of their shelves for a few minutes, looking at all the spines they’ve loved. I decided to sit with a Moniepoint engineer to unpack what he’s reading, the titles he loves, the ones he constantly returns to, and those he inscribes on the TBR list of others.

Qazim and I are inhabitants of Moniepoint’s Slack channel for DreamMakers who love books. It’s where we trade chats on chapters, argue gently over plot twists, and occasionally swoon over a beautifully written Substack article. He is an application monitoring engineer, part of Moniepoint’s site reliability engineering job family. In practice, that means he spends his days watching over the systems that make sure customer transactions happen as they should.

His team monitors switch applications, the unseen pathways that connect POS terminals to banks, and Moniepoint’s systems to NIBSS, looking out for throughput, latency, CPU usage, and any sign that all is as it should be. When an anomaly shows up, he acts fast. It’s work that doesn’t wait for disasters; it’s about anticipating them. If a payment institution depends on Moniepoint’s systems, Qazim’s job is to make sure their transactions are seamless, even at the busiest times of day.

It’s easy to assume that the skill for this kind of work comes entirely from technical training and books, but Qazim makes a different case. As a child, his mother often insisted he read, but his way around it was to slip a Supa Strikas comic into the middle of the book she had chosen for him. Sometimes he got away with it, sometimes not. It was not until secondary school, with long empty days at home, that he picked up a novel for real. He would go on to serve as Chief Librarian during his time in higher education.

But the first real encounter with a book that pulled him in completely was Stiletto by Harold Robbins, an Italian mafia novel filled with love, betrayal, business, family, and tradition. He plans to revisit it soon, if only to check if the memory is as golden as he thinks, but books have become both a mirror to reflect on himself and a window to see beyond his own life. 

PART 2

Qazim became a bibliophile fifteen years ago. At the time, Lola Shoneyin’s debut, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, was being published in the UK. In Port Harcourt, I had saved up coins and notes to buy my first proper book, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This came after reading my father’s English dictionary, a worn copy of Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

Over time, my taste in literature has shifted away from Europe, and so has Qazim’s. Where he once read mostly foreign novels, he now finds himself gravitating to Nigerian authors. The settings, characters, and struggles feel closer to his own life, he tells me. Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s A Spell of Good Things, Chimeka Garricks’ Tomorrow Died Yesterday, and Max Siollun’s Soldiers Of Fortune are among the books he revisits most often. Some, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, stand out for the conversations they spark on Nigerian history. Others, like Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s Stay With Me, are books he returns to often, the way some people replay their favourite scene in a movie.

As an Application Monitoring Engineer, reading across genres, from Harold Robbins to Nigerian contemporary fiction, civil war histories to memoirs, has sharpened his ability to notice patterns, read between the lines, and communicate clearly. “Reading makes you more empathetic,” he tells me, “and empathy helps when you’re working with people to solve problems. You understand where they’re coming from, even when you’re troubleshooting under pressure.”

As a book lover, books fall into two categories for Qazim. Technical books on AWS, database management, and cloud infrastructure are reference materials. He dips into them for the exact information he needs, then moves on to practice the theories they hold. Sometimes he consults product documentation or specific technical chapters just to clarify how a system is provisioned, connecting technical reading to his problem-solving mindset at work.

Fiction and memoirs are different. Those, he reads for depth and connection. Non-fiction still tops his preference list. Physical books hold a certain magic for him, the smell, the weight, the fact that there’s no Wi-Fi to cause distractions. Still, practicality means he reads more e-books than anything else these days. He enjoys behavioural and economics-oriented books too, like Atomic Habits and Think and Grow Rich, because they speak to patterns in human decision-making that fascinate his Economics background.

PART 3

Qazim joined Moniepoint in June of the previous year and has been here for fourteen months. From the beginning, he describes his experience as a ride filled with beautiful people, great ideas, and challenges that keep him learning. He sees his role as a “watchman”, like a detective in a crime fiction, constantly observing, judging, advising, and making sure problems are solved before they even arise. “I want to be there before it happens, to make sure things do not break. When issues do occur, I am already solving them,” he tells me.

His approach is proactive, connecting dots across complex systems and logs, anticipating issues across cloud platforms, databases, and the company’s infrastructure. Colleagues and clients have already recognised this attention to detail, sometimes remarking that he communicates and responds as if he has been at Moniepoint for much longer than he has.

When I asked Qazim if he had ever gone looking for himself in a fictional character, the way I do, he paused.  I thought of my own experience reading when I read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights many years ago, imagining for a long time that I was Catherine Earnshaw, minus the eccentricities. He admitted that Santiago from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, someone in his pursuit of his dreams, being restless until he connects the dots, and sometimes needs reminding that the treasure isn't always at the destination, but also in the journey, did feel familiar.

During his teamwide standups, where over a hundred DreamMakers share what they are reading, watching, or listening to for the weekend, he joins in the tradition of recommending books to colleagues, discussing plot points, and encouraging others to pick up stories that resonate with them. When we got to book recommendations, he pointed first to Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money. A book he’s recommending, not because it’s about finance, but because it’s about people, how they think, what they value, and why they make the choices they do. I’m left adrift, unsure if this is the book lover or the engineer. But he also dabbles in Damilare Kuku’s work, so there’s hope for fiction after all.

Epilogue

As our conversation winds down, it’s clear that for Qazim, the line between reading and working is a fine blend. Both require paying attention to details that most people overlook. Both reward curiosity and patience. Both are, in their way, about making sense of complex systems, whether that’s the architecture of a cloud platform or the lives unfolding across the pages of a novel. This sense of shared curiosity is as much a part of his book life as the solitary moments watching Moniepoint’s systems.

If you love books and are great at what you do, then come join a lot of people who are like you at Moniepoint. Visit our careers page to get started