Software architect & engineer ยท Nairobi, Kenya
Understand the machine before abstracting over it.
I design and build backend-heavy systems for organisations where correctness, security and long-term maintainability can't be traded away โ platforms that move money, hold sensitive data, or run workflows people depend on every day. Some of that is greenfield work; some of it is modernising systems that have outgrown their first design.
I care less about what's fashionable and more about what still holds up when traffic spikes, when a payment webhook fires twice, or when the original authors have moved on.
- Integrity lives in the database. Constraints, transaction boundaries and indexes do the enforcing, not hopeful application code.
- Hard problems first. State, concurrency and data integrity get settled early, before they're expensive to change.
- Every abstraction has to earn its keep. I'd rather add structure when the code asks for it than guess at it up front.
- Business logic stays out of the framework. Authentication and authorisation are separate concerns.
- ikopurrty.com โ an event ticketing platform with M-Pesa (Daraja) payments: order-and-payment-first checkout, an append-only payment ledger, idempotent webhooks and row-level locking. Live ahead of launch โ get in touch for a demo.
- Kanuni (private) โ a document retrieval and Q&A pipeline over a large public-records corpus. Written in Go.
- ws โ a small shell tool for opening workspaces by name.
Backend โ TypeScript, Node.js, Express, Next.js, Go, REST API design Data โ PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL, Prisma, Redis, MongoDB, Neon Frontend โ React, Next.js, Tailwind, TanStack Query, Redux, Zod, GSAP, Motion Infra & tools โ Linux, Bash/zsh, Git, pnpm, Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify
Open to freelance and contract work. Reach me on X, through my portfolio, or by email at [email protected].
๐ isaacgitonga.com ยท ๐ผ LinkedIn ยท ๐ @_isaacgitonga

