Hi, I'm Elias.

I build software as infrastructure for people - not as product, not as spectacle, but as the quiet machinery that holds complex systems together when no one is watching.

I'm a senior software engineer at OpenFn, where most of my time goes into Lightning, an open-source workflow engine used by governments, NGOs, and public health institutions to integrate fragile systems and automate processes where failure has real human cost. The work sits at a boundary I find endlessly interesting: between what is technically elegant and what is operationally necessary. These are rarely the same thing, and learning to navigate that tension is most of what senior engineering actually is.

Before and alongside that, I've spent years working at the intersection of AI, systems design, and education. I built ask, a CLI tool that brings LLMs into the terminal where developers already think. I built tyrex, a genetic programming library in Elixir, because I believe evolutionary computation is underexplored and Elixir's concurrency model is quietly revolutionary for it. I've written courses on deep learning, visualized algorithms to make them legible, and built small tools that solve one problem well - because I think the best software disappears into the workflow.

I founded GalsenAI to grow the AI and software engineering ecosystem in Senegal. Not to replicate Silicon Valley, but to build something that makes sense for our context - where constraints are different, where infrastructure can't be assumed, and where the problems worth solving don't always look like the ones in the textbooks. I teach, I mentor, and I try to make the path shorter for those coming after me.

My deepest conviction is that most hard problems in software are sociotechnical before they are technical. That open source is an act of stewardship, not charity. That AI is powerful, but understanding always matters more than prediction. And that the right amount of complexity is the minimum amount - three honest lines of code will always beat a premature abstraction.

I enjoy working with people who think in systems, who value clarity over cleverness, and who care about the long-term shape of the things they build.