Insights
Notes from building real products.
How booking systems, payments, delivery apps and online institutes actually work under the hood — written from platforms I've shipped, for founders and teams deciding what to build.
Engineering4 min read
How to stop a booking app from selling the same seat twice
In travel, a double-booked seat isn't a refund — it's a passenger at a terminal at midnight holding a ticket that means nothing. Here's the seat-hold pattern I built for a bus booking platform.
- Booking systems
- Redis
- Concurrency
- Node.js
Engineering3 min read
Integrating M-Pesa STK Push into a marketplace: what actually matters
Most Kenyan buyers pay with M-Pesa, not cards. Here's what mattered when I took Safaricom's Daraja STK Push live across a multi-vendor marketplace's web and mobile apps.
- M-Pesa
- Payments
Guides3 min read
Building a restaurant's own delivery app: five lessons from replacing the aggregator
A single kitchen can't absorb the mistakes a marketplace shrugs off. Five lessons from building a five-app delivery system so one restaurant could stop paying aggregator commissions.
- Food delivery
- Restaurants
Engineering3 min read
Scheduling dozens of live classes on a limited pool of Zoom licences
Each Zoom licence hosts one meeting at a time. Here's how I took the human out of live-class scheduling for a coaching institute — and caught clashes before students did.
- EdTech
- Zoom API
Engineering2 min read
Why a social app's feed should never touch its payments database
A creator app has social-media read traffic and a payments system's correctness requirements. Here's how I separated the two without reaching for microservices.
- Architecture
- PostgreSQL
Guides2 min read
Off-the-shelf or custom software? A practical checklist for small businesses
Custom software isn't always the answer — sometimes a SaaS subscription is the smarter buy. Here's the checklist I walk clients through before recommending either.
- Custom software
- Small business
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