About me

My name is Albert Sema. I live in Cary, North Carolina, with my wife Minette and our two daughters. Life here is a blend of family, workouts, code, and systems design.

I'm an engineer and an entrepreneur.

Family, health, and fitness

Family is the center. Evenings and weekends belong to Minette and the girls; most of what I build is built around them, not the other way around.

Most mornings start with a workout — strength and conditioning, early, before the house wakes up. I used to treat training as optional. I don't anymore. Energy is the input everything else depends on.

Same with sleep. I'm done trading it for work.

Where I come from

I started my career in 2006 writing software for governments in Africa — tax and customs systems first, then nearly a decade of donor-funded work with USAID and the World Bank. Since 2016 I've been at Cisco as a tech lead.

That path taught me something early: software outlives the people who build it. A tax system doesn't care that the consultant went home. It has to keep working through staff turnover, power cuts, and every assumption the original team got wrong.

What shaped me

My father, Dr. Norbert Sema, died in a plane crash in September 1997. For years my compass was "What would Dad do?" — until I understood the better question: what would the person he raised me to be do? I wrote about him here.

Losing him changed how I see time. It is probably why I write about systems that outlast their builders. The two subjects are closer than they look.

How I think

Good software is shaped more by judgment than by tools. Tools change quickly. Decisions don't.

I tend to focus on:

• Tradeoffs instead of best practices
• Constraints instead of optionality
• Simplicity instead of cleverness
• Reversibility instead of optimization

Most software problems aren't only technical. They're about time, responsibility, and the cost of decisions that linger longer than expected.

The work I've chosen

My background is systems design and backend engineering (Ruby, Go), infrastructure, and AI-enabled tooling. I use AI daily, carefully, and I'm as interested in where it doesn't belong as where it does.

Alongside my full-time role, I run brimtech, a small engineering studio where I work with a limited number of clients on complex backend and AI problems. I also work with SerdiPay on mobile-money interoperability in the DRC.

I don't advertise services here. But if you read long enough, you'll have a good sense of how I work.

What I'm curious about

What happens to software now that code is no longer scarce. Where AI belongs in systems that must stay understandable. How small teams now do work that used to take large ones — and what that costs.

What I'm building toward

Fewer, better things. A small studio known for work that holds up. Writing that still reads well in three years. Enough clarity — in code, in systems, in life — that my future self has less to regret.

If this way of thinking resonates, you're welcome to stay.