About me

I write software for organisations where the work is real and the margin for error is small. Payroll for volunteer teachers. Savings ledgers for village groups. Billing data for a water utility.

I have worked in agriculture, finance, logistics and public services for over a decade. Most of that work sits between the engineering and the business decision, which is where the interesting problems are and where most projects go wrong.

I founded Podii in 2018 and run it as chief executive. We build web, mobile and cloud systems for clients in Africa and further afield. Running it has meant doing the architecture, the hiring, the client conversations and the budgets, often in the same week. The lesson I did not expect was how little the individual engineer matters next to whether the team has a clear brief and the authority to act on it.

I have contracted with Adobe, Fly.io, Frame.io and Pulpo, on warehouse management, financial technology, document processing and collaboration platforms. The technical work is mostly distributed systems and high-concurrency applications.

I have recruited and mentored more than 30 engineers, mostly through pair programming. What I have settled on is simple enough to say out loud. Tell people why the work matters, then let them decide how to do it. Be clear about what you expect back. Teams that get that need very little managing.

Outside client work I put time into the engineering community here. I co-founded Elixir Kenya and ElixirConf Africa, and I spent four years as an undergraduate teaching assistant at JKUAT supporting students moving into software development.

The work I care most about is in essential services. In agriculture that has meant platforms that get information to farmers and make the operational side legible. That work is where I learned the constraint is almost never the technology. It is whether the people using it can fit it into how they already work.

The test of a system is not whether it works on the day you hand it over. It is whether the team can change it a year later without calling you.

Principles

• Build systems that scale rather than solutions that need constant manual intervention.
• Develop people alongside products. The team outlasts the project.
• Design for the constraints people actually work under, not the ones in the brief.
• Measure the outcome, not the number of features shipped.
• Give engineers ownership, and the authority that has to come with it.

Technical background

Elixir, Phoenix, Ruby on Rails and Flutter; PostgreSQL; AWS and Google Cloud Platform; Docker, Jenkins and CI/CD. Distributed systems, high-concurrency applications and cloud-native architecture, with applied AI work in document intelligence, recommendation systems, compliance automation and decision support.

Education

• Executive Master of Business Administration Strathmore Business School · 2026 – 2028 (in progress)
• BSc Electronic and Computer Engineering Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology · 2007 – 2012
• BSc Electrical and Electronic Engineering Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology · 2007 – 2012