KuGompo City · Est. 2026Issue 004 · October 2026

The House of RosesPRESS

Essays and field notes by Nandawula Regine, published in numbered issues. The writing, and the making of the work, in one house.

004

On the stands

The Proof Issue

Field Notes

The lead · Field Notes

A Test Booklet in Your Pocket

How K53 Drill Master was built for the phone people actually own. Every decision priced in kilobytes, one question asked of all of them, and why a quiz app ended up with a breathing exercise.

Read it

Also in this issue

  1. 01Know Before You GoTrue Access maps where disabled South Africans can actually get in. Building it taught me that an accessible app has to be accessible when it fails, too, and that silence is the most inaccessible thing software does.Essays · 28 Sept 2026
  2. 02The Site Was Selling Half the ProductAn audit traced every number my brands publish back to the code it describes. Two were invented. Most of the rest were too small. What I learned from the week my marketing had to prove itself.Field Notes · 28 Sept 2026
  3. 03What Nova CostsVarsityOS gave South African students an AI companion for R49 a month, unlimited. Then I did the arithmetic on a single message. A field note on pricing AI in rands, and on the conversations that should never touch a paid model at all.Field Notes · 28 Sept 2026
  4. 04The Index Is Not the TerritoryMy AI built a week of posts for Sanyu Botanicals from a database of what we owned, and never opened the folder itself. On the difference between knowing about something and looking at it, and the whisk that nobody else could show.Essays · 28 Sept 2026

The back issues

002

Eight Apps, One Year

June 2026 · 11 pieces

  1. 01Building AI Chatbots with Personality: Lessons from Creating NandaAIHow I built an AI assistant that feels human, blending OpenAI APIs with cultural context and poetic sensibility.Field Notes · 13 Jun 2026
  2. 02Notion Systems That Actually Work: How I Save Clients 40-60% Admin TimeThe architecture behind 15+ Notion templates that transform chaos into clarity, from CRMs to financial dashboards.Field Notes · 12 Jun 2026
  3. 03Poetry Is the Algorithm of Feeling: Why I WriteFrom "Inside Her Roses" to national television, my journey with words and why poetry remains my first language.Essays · 11 Jun 2026
  4. 04Creativity as Resistance: Being a Black Woman in Tech and ArtNavigating two worlds that weren't designed for me, and building new ones that are.Essays · 10 Jun 2026
  5. 05How I Built a 15-Wing Personal AI Operating System in 6 MonthsJarvisOS isn't a productivity app. It's a full intelligence layer for my life: CEO decisions, finance, cycle tracking, RAG knowledge base, crisis routing. Here's the architecture.Field Notes · 10 Jun 2026
  6. 06True Access: Building SA's First Disability Accessibility Map, SANS 10400-S, Expo SDK 52, and the B2B Flywheel4.2 million South Africans with disabilities have no verified database of accessible public spaces. True Access is the infrastructure. Here's the architecture that turned compliance auditing into a revenue engine.Field Notes · 5 Jun 2026
  7. 07From HTML to 15-Wing AI OS: The Technology Arc of One Year Building in AfricaJuly 13, 2025: first line of HTML. June 2026: a 15-wing personal AI operating system, 8 production apps, 1,000+ commits. Here's the exact technology arc: what I learned, what broke, what I'd do differently.Field Notes · 1 Jun 2026
  8. 08Claude MCP Is the Missing Layer: Why Model Context Protocol Changes EverythingModel Context Protocol isn't just another API feature. It's the infrastructure layer that makes AI agents genuinely useful in production. Here's how I've built with it.Field Notes · 28 May 2026
  9. 09African Women and the Fifth Industrial Revolution: We Are Not Late AdoptersThe narrative that Africa is "catching up" to the 5IR misunderstands both Africa and the revolution. African women are not late adopters of AI. We are building the version of it that the continent actually needs.Essays · 21 May 2026
  10. 10Building Prompt Caching into Production: How I Cut Claude API Costs by 85%Prompt caching is the most underused cost optimization in AI development. Here's the exact implementation pattern I use across 8 production applications.Field Notes · 14 May 2026
  11. 11SM-2 in Production: How a 1980s Algorithm Fixed SA's 60% Learner's Licence Fail RateK53 Drill Master uses the same spaced repetition algorithm behind Anki and Duolingo. Here's why a 40-year-old algorithm is still the most effective learning system ever built, and how I implemented it for 395 road signs.Field Notes · 7 May 2026
001

The Launch Issue

April 2026 · 12 pieces

  1. 01isiXhosa Without a Library: Engineering Multilingual Learning Apps for South Africa's 11 LanguagesK53 Drill Master supports isiXhosa natively. There was no library to install. Here's what engineering for African language support actually looks like, and why 40KB matters at 3G.Field Notes · 30 Apr 2026
  2. 02The Routerless State Machine: Using Game Architecture as a Security PrimitiveK53 Drill Master's premium content cannot be URL-scraped because the URL never encodes game state. This was not an accident. Here's the security architecture hiding inside a study app.Field Notes · 23 Apr 2026
  3. 03Building While Black, Building While Woman: The Infrastructure of Being SeenThe most invisible labour in African tech is the constant work of establishing credibility in spaces not designed to grant it. Here's what building 8 applications as a Black woman in East London taught me about the infrastructure of being seen.Essays · 9 Apr 2026
  4. 04The African Developer's Production Stack: Building for Load Shedding, 3G, and PayFastEvery architecture decision I make gets tested against one question: will this work at 3am during Stage 6 load shedding on a R99/month data bundle? Here's the stack that passes.Field Notes · 19 Mar 2026
  5. 05Green Vault: Building a PayFast-Integrated eCommerce Demo for the South African MarketMost eCommerce templates are built for Stripe in USD. Green Vault is a production-ready demo built from the ground up for South African PayFast payments, with a token-based economy, AI chatbot, glassmorphism UI, and zero external dependencies.Field Notes · 9 Mar 2026
  6. 06PoetryTube: Building the Video Poetry Platform African Poets Actually DeserveMainstream video platforms deprioritize literary content and African voices. I built PoetryTube: a dedicated video poetry platform with Supabase Auth, AI poem completion, mood detection, and video hosting infrastructure designed specifically for African and diaspora spoken word artists.Field Notes · 9 Mar 2026
  7. 07Campus Compass: Building an AI Student Super-App for South Africa's 11 Million Varsity StudentsSouth African university students navigate NSFAS deadlines, load shedding, financial stress, and academic pressure simultaneously. I built Campus Compass: a zero-dependency PWA with GPT-4o-mini mental health AI, budget tracking, meal planning, and study tools designed specifically for the SA student experience.Field Notes · 9 Mar 2026
  8. 08My First API Integration: Building a Weather App with SheCodes That Changed How I Think About CodeThe weather app was my first real API integration: 5 commits, vanilla JavaScript, OpenWeather API, and the moment I understood that code could talk to the world. Here's what building it actually taught me.Field Notes · 9 Mar 2026
  9. 09How I Built K53 Drill Master: AI-Powered Driving Test Prep for 1.2 Million South AfricansSouth Africa has a 50%+ K53 learner licence failure rate. I built a R29/month AI-powered prep platform in React + Supabase + PayFast that puts world-class study tools in the hands of township learners, rural communities, and anyone who can't afford to fail twice.Field Notes · 9 Mar 2026
  10. 10The PayFast Universal Hub: One Webhook, Six Applications, Zero LeakagePayFast only allows one set of ITN webhook URLs per merchant account. I have six applications. Here's the routing architecture that makes one webhook serve all of them, with full tenant isolation.Field Notes · 9 Mar 2026
  11. 11Graphic Design in the Claude Era: How AI Changed My Visual Creative ProcessI'm not a trained graphic designer. I built the brand identity for 8 applications, a poetry brand, and a botanical product line. This is the AI-powered design workflow that made that possible.Essays · 19 Feb 2026
  12. 121,000 Commits, 8 Apps, One Year: What Building Actually Taught MeA year ago I wrote my first line of JavaScript. Today I have 1,000+ commits across 8 production applications. This is not a success story. It's a true story.Essays · 22 Jan 2026

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