First-hand notes on building for Africa.
28 March 2026 · Engineering · 3 min read
Multi-tenant architecture: financial isolation on $15 a month
Two-dimensional tenant isolation, a single $7 VPS and a ~$11/month total for a production platform with CI/CD, WAF, backups and error tracking.
22 March 2026 · Industry · 2 min read
USSD gateway design: 160 characters, 180 seconds, every GSM phone
The thin-gateway pattern behind two production USSD systems: session state in Redis, menus in 160 characters, one backend serving every channel.
15 March 2026 · Engineering · 3 min read
Offline-first architecture: designing for 72 hours without signal
The local database is the data layer, not a cache. Patterns from production systems in East and Southern Africa that keep working when the network doesn't.