I started with a booking page for a salon. I am now the only engineer on a platform 112 schools depend on

I started in 2019 building sites for small businesses in Kenya. A salon, a coffee training company, a technology retailer, a community organisation. Work that nobody puts in a portfolio, which is exactly why mine keeps it.

That work taught me three things I still use daily. The client is the maintainer, so if an update is awkward the site goes stale and starts doing harm. Nobody cares what it is built with. And a site nobody can find is a brochure nobody reads, which is where I learned technical search work properly, out of necessity rather than interest.

The dealership platforms came next, which were the first time a site had to earn money rather than exist. Then an internet provider, where I learned that the primary answer has to survive the worst plausible connection, because the people most in need of better internet are the ones checking on the worst of it.

Since 2023 I have been the sole engineer on Enaton, a school management platform. It went from zero customers to 112 schools. I designed it, I ship it, I operate it, and I am the one who gets called when it breaks.

What changed with scale was not the questions. It was the cost of getting them wrong. A mistake on a salon booking page is an embarrassing afternoon. A mistake in a figure somebody quotes to a parent across a counter is a person losing trust in every number on every screen, including the ones that were always right.

I write. 33 posts published on dev.to, and the ones that landed hardest were consistently the ones that admitted something rather than the ones that explained something. The most read is about competition in the React framework space. The one I am most pleased with is about still looking things up after six years.

I am in Nairobi, on East Africa Time, which overlaps a full European working day and most of a US morning. That is a genuine practical advantage for a distributed team and it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving somebody to work out the timezone maths.

I am open to senior backend and full stack roles, remote and permanent. Not contract, not between projects. The work I am proudest of took years, and that is not an accident.