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My name is Rufus, not Roofie, Ruff-Ruff or Ruforce. You can call me ‘OluwaRufus’, ‘The Pope’ or ‘Fixer’ at Cregital. My role is majorly web development, providing tech support for building client websites, Cregital’s products and kicking users out of our internet in order to optimise its efficiency..lol.
Sometime in 2013, my Boss informed us that we will be powering the bookstore section of a WordPress-based website with GTBank’s payment gateway; GTPay. I can remember opening my system immediately in search of a WordPress plugin that will integrate GTPay with any of the two e-commerce plugins I was considering (WP-Commerce and Woocommerce). Sadly, I couldn’t find anything relating to it on the Google nor WordPress plugin repository. Hope dashed, right?
I was left with the option of either telling my boss that we can’t build the store with WordPress and recommending we code the store from scratch or develop a plugin to do that. The former seemed easier to me… back then (I could conjure codes within hours with Adobe Dreamweaver), but I decided to go for the latter which was a challenge. This meant I had to learn WordPress plugin development & study how WooCommerce works before I could write a GTPay extension.
In about 3 days, I developed two plugins referencing WooCommerce and WordPress documentation. One didn’t work perfectly so I trashed it and fine tuned the other. Eureka! It worked! Version 1.0.0 ready. One morning a thought struck me, if I searched for such a plugin and couldn’t find it that means no one else has it yet and someone like me will soon search for it as well. So, why don’t I just put this online and market it? I took permission from my boss and bought my domain name so the world could have access to this plugin as well.
Later that year, Evans found my site and contacted me. He wanted to integrate GTPay on one of his client’s website. I generated an invoice for him. Yes, an invoice. I was getting a little more corporate as I was determined to become a full-time freelancer after school. I did the integration and that was it, version 1.0. A few months later, he contacted me for more dev work including Stanbic IBTC’s MyBluePay payment gateway. I’ll name my price, I’ll get it done and he’ll pay.
He mentioned one day that he had left his full time job at Konga and was looking to start a digital agency the following year and I told him to “remember me in his kingdom”; that was my job application. We worked very closely on some projects until late 2014 when he told me he was about to launch Cregital. Evans said he would like to have me on board. I agreed and I have no regrets.
I got a job with Cregital simply because I provided a solution to a problem instead of avoiding it. You never can tell what or who will be the key that opens the next door. Keep creating, keep challenging yourself and always be open to opportunities for growth.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Keep challenging yourself and always be open to opportunities for growth.” user=”Oluwarufus” usehashtags=”no” url=”https://cregital.com/gtbank-landed-job/”]
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