Member Spotlight: Mayowa Fajobi

It has been such a joy getting to know our DZone contributors beyond reading their incredible articles. And, pretends to be shocked, developers do, in fact, have lives outside of working on their computers. From building open-source projects to spending quality time with their families, DZone’s community is full of not only subject-matter experts, but passionate individuals with interesting stories to tell. One of those individuals happens to be our Member Spotlight of the week.

Mayowa Fajobi may be a newer face on DZone, but he’s already an established leader in tech spaces like platform engineering, AI-driven solutions, and open source strategy. But don’t just take my word for it! Learn more about Mayowa, his background, and the career journey that brought him to where he is today.

1. What first got you interested in technology?

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that technology can turn complex problems into something simple and repeatable. My interest really took shape when I started working with Linux and infrastructure and realised that I could automate processes that would otherwise require hours of manual work. That eventually led me into DevOps, cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes, and then into open source, where I could contribute to the tools I was using rather than simply consuming them.

2. If you could only keep three tools in your developer toolkit, what would they be and why?

Linux, Git, and Kubernetes. Linux gives me the foundation for understanding what is actually happening beneath the applications and platforms I build. Git is indispensable for collaboration, experimentation, and open-source contribution. Kubernetes brings the two together at scale and has become one of the most interesting platforms for solving distributed infrastructure problems. If I had to pick a fourth, I’d probably struggle not to say a terminal!

3. What advice would you give someone just getting started in your field?

Don’t wait until you feel like an expert before you start building. Learn the fundamentals, build things that break, investigate why they broke, and repeat the process. I would also encourage people to contribute to open source early; even documentation fixes, tests, or small bug fixes can teach you how real-world software is designed and maintained. Most importantly, focus on solving problems rather than collecting technologies.

4. As someone working across platform engineering, AI, and open source, what change do you think will have the biggest impact on how engineering teams build and operate software over the next few years, and what do you think technical leaders should be doing now to prepare for it?

I think the biggest shift will be the move from software built around long-running services to software built around intelligent, autonomous, and ephemeral workloads. AI is accelerating this transition. Instead of predictable compute shaped by static deployments, we’re entering a world where agents appear, execute work, pause, resume, and scale dynamically based on context.

This will force infrastructure to become far more adaptive, capable of allocating, reusing, and governing compute in real time rather than through fixed-capacity models. Because of this, platform engineering must evolve. It will shift from simply providing clusters and pipelines to providing a unified abstraction layer that manages workload lifecycle, security, observability, and cost for increasingly dynamic systems.

Technical leaders should prepare now by:

• Investing in strong platform foundations and treating infrastructure as a product.
• Designing for automation, portability, and policy-driven governance rather than rigid setups.
• Creating safe pathways for engineers to experiment with AI while maintaining strict security and visibility boundaries.

Finally, open source will be essential. No single organization can solve these challenges alone. The teams that adapt well will be those that combine solid engineering fundamentals with active participation in the wider ecosystem.

5. What’s your ideal way to spend a weekend?

A good balance of technology, music, and time away from technology. I enjoy spending time with family, exploring somewhere new, and playing the piano. I also try to switch off for a while, although I’ll inevitably end up opening my laptop at some point, usually because an interesting open-source problem has been sitting in the back of my mind all week!

Check out Mayowa's content here.