Software architect & engineer · 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 — 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 — 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 — get in touch for a demo.
• Kanuni (private) — a document retrieval and Q&A pipeline over a large public-records corpus. Written in Go.
• ws — a small shell tool for opening workspaces by name.

Backend — TypeScript, Node.js, Express, Next.js, Go, REST API design Data — PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL, Prisma, Redis, MongoDB, Neon Frontend — React, Next.js, Tailwind, TanStack Query, Redux, Zod, GSAP, Motion Infra & tools — 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 advisory@isaacgitonga.com.

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