BY Oluwatoyin Akande · < 1 MIN READ
Clement Omiwale didn’t speak a word of Dutch. That detail alone could have disqualified him from working with one of the Netherlands’ oldest mobility companies as remote software developer but it didn’t.
Instead, he found himself inside the software systems of Broekhuis, fixing bugs, rewriting features, and building tools used by people across the country.
How he got there is a quiet story of learning, trust, and grit.
Clement’s first introduction to technology was in secondary school where he took a course in computer studies. It was nothing elaborate or extensive. Mostly desktop publishing and basic data processing. On the day he received his certificate, his teacher called him out in front of the class and praised him for doing well. That moment stayed with him.
By university, he wasn’t just learning code. He was building with it. He started freelancing and creating websites for real clients. At that time, his tools were PHP, jQuery, and SaaS. Then he stumbled on Drupal. At first, it felt unfamiliar and unlearnable, but he stayed with it.
Fast forward to 2023, Tunga found Clement on LinkedIn. By then, he had some international experience and years of self-taught work under his belt. He had already been working remotely for a couple of years, but this job offer felt different. It promised a chance to work on a meaningful product and be compensated fairly for his time.
After passing a technical test and going through a few interviews, he was matched with Broekhuis, a Dutch mobility company with nearly a century of history and a complex digital footprint. He didn’t know much about the country or the company, but he said yes when he got the offer.
To his surprise, when the first ticket came in, it was written in Dutch. So was the next one. And the one after that.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wait. Is everything going to be like this?’” he said.
It was. Tickets from customers came written in Dutch.
Clement knew he had to make it work with the limited resources he had, Chrome Translate and his teammates. So he made it work.
He translated what he could and read each task line by line. He tried again when the translation failed. He used logic when the language didn’t help and asked questions when he needed clarity. Over time, he stopped depending on the literal translations and started interpreting based on the context.
“It was like coding with a blindfold,” he says. “But it helped me sharpen my skills.”
He wasn’t solving problems by copying tutorials. He was learning to think in systems, adjusting to ambiguity, and delivering without waiting for everything to be perfect. This is what remote software development often looks like behind the scenes.
One of his first assignments started small. Broekhuis needed a CKEditor plugin that allowed users to open links in new tabs. There was no existing plugin that worked, so he decided to build one. The plugin worked so well, other teams adopted it, and it stayed.
Later, the frontend team refactored one of Broekhuis’s key sales pages using jQuery and vanilla JavaScript. The backend broke and page performance suffered. Clement stepped in, diagnosed the issue, and rebuilt the logic. He cut load times by nearly forty percent.
Then came a new project. It was a Greenfield platform, and he led the authentication setup using Drupal login and Auth0. He built secure, role-based access and linked it to the platform’s permission system.
“None of it was about showing off,” he says. “It was about building tools that helped people get their work done.”
These contributions made him more than just a contributor. He became a trusted developer in a multicultural engineering team, working effectively across language barriers and time zones.
He expected to grow technically, but what he did not expect was how much this work would shape him as a professional. Working remotely at Broekhuis sharpened his soft skills. There were days of silence. No meetings. No quick feedback. Just the problem in front of him and the decision to keep going.
He learned how to manage himself, how to write clearly, and how to document his work so that others could build on it. He learned how to trust his own judgment, even when no one was watching.
He credits his team lead at Broekhuis for giving him space to figure things out, and his delivery manager at Tunga for always being there in the background. “She never made it feel like I worked for Tunga or for the client,” he says. “She treated me like a professional. Like an equal. That made all the difference.”
Clement didn’t speak the language, but his code did. By the time the project wrapped, he had built more than features. He had built a better version of himself.
“I can categorically say I became a full-grown Drupal developer there.”
He was the first developer Tunga placed with Broekhuis. Since then, five more African software developers have followed. “I like to believe I was a good ambassador,” he says.
Clement’s story is not loud because it doesn’t need to be. It is not about code or language. It is about clarity, focus, and discipline. It is about the belief that when things don’t make sense, you can still figure them out. He is proof that the best career moves do not begin with certainty. They begin with a quiet decision to keep going.
At Tunga, that is the kind of belief we look for.
And Clement, he proved us right.
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