Articles
Essays on engineering, AI, product, and building software for Africa.
Product
First Principles, Not Competitors
Why Kudapara rejects competitor-copy culture — the Algorithm, rejected analogies, and how we decide what to build for African markets.
Not an agency. Not a clone.
How Kudapara differs from consultancies, single-founder shops, and startups that ship Western software with a local skin.
The Agentic Company
How Kudapara runs real departments as Hermes profiles — Kanban as the engine, Basecamp for the principal, and hard lines that keep speed honest.
Building Muchiround: Business and community on one stack
What Muchiround actually is, according to the codebase — commerce, social, logistics, wallets, leads, messaging, and AI sharing identity and ledger.
Claude Code for Product Managers: How AI Changed Our Planning Process
How one general manager runs a full product cycle — planning, monitoring, research — using AI coding tools without writing a single line of production code.
Engineering
Production-ready. Still fast.
How Kudapara ships with Hermes agents, Kanban handoffs, PR discipline, local CI merge gates, and the Algorithm before automation.
Self-Hosting Pelias: Geocoding for African Addresses
How we deployed Pelias geocoder on a single VM to handle descriptive African addresses that Google Maps can't resolve — for $5/month.
Rails 8 Engine Architecture: Building a Monolith That Scales
Why we chose a single Rails monolith with domain engines instead of microservices — and how we structure it so the codebase stays manageable as we grow.
AI
Shipping Code with Hermes: A 7-Step Workflow for Building Your Dream App
How to go from zero to shipped with Hermes Agent — the exact 7-step workflow we used to build Muchiround.
The Folder Is the Agent: Running 44 AI Agents Across Projects
I'm running 44 AI agents across multiple projects. Each one is just a model pointed at a folder. Here's the architecture and what I learned.
The Science of Why AI Still Can't Write Like You
New research on writing style reveals that the most distinctive parts of your prose are the ones you don't even think about — and models can't replicate them.