Dev.to
7/19/2026
The original title is: "Building a Rural Healthcare Booking System in Nigeria: Three Bugs That Tested Everything"
Original: The Hardest System I Ever Built Was for Patients Who Could Not Afford for It to Fail
Short summary
A first-person account of building a health information and appointment booking system for rural clinics in Delta State, Nigeria, as a university final-year project. The system ran on 2G connections and entry-level phones using SMS, WhatsApp, and USSD channels. The author details three critical bugs including a GPS coordinate transcription error that placed a clinic in the ocean off Ghana, and the server-side bounding-box validation that fixed it.
- •Real healthcare system for rural Nigerian clinics serving patients on 2G with USSD and SMS
- •GPS coordinate transcription errors placed a clinic off the coast of Ghana due to manual data entry
- •Server-side geographic bounding-box validation prevented invalid coordinates from being saved
Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.
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