An imprint · 20 pieces
Field Notes
How the builds were made, decision by decision.
The Proof Issue, October 2026
The Site Was Selling Half the Product
An 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.
28 September 20267 min
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.
28 September 20266 min
What Nova Costs
VarsityOS 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.
28 September 20265 min
Eight Apps, One Year, June 2026
Building AI Chatbots with Personality: Lessons from Creating NandaAI
How I built an AI assistant that feels human, blending OpenAI APIs with cultural context and poetic sensibility.
13 June 20266 min
Notion Systems That Actually Work: How I Save Clients 40-60% Admin Time
The architecture behind 15+ Notion templates that transform chaos into clarity, from CRMs to financial dashboards.
12 June 20265 min
How I Built a 15-Wing Personal AI Operating System in 6 Months
JarvisOS 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.
10 June 202610 min
True Access: Building SA's First Disability Accessibility Map, SANS 10400-S, Expo SDK 52, and the B2B Flywheel
4.2 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.
5 June 20268 min
From HTML to 15-Wing AI OS: The Technology Arc of One Year Building in Africa
July 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.
1 June 20268 min
Claude MCP Is the Missing Layer: Why Model Context Protocol Changes Everything
Model 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.
28 May 20268 min
Building 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.
14 May 20267 min
SM-2 in Production: How a 1980s Algorithm Fixed SA's 60% Learner's Licence Fail Rate
K53 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.
7 May 20267 min
The Launch Issue, April 2026
isiXhosa Without a Library: Engineering Multilingual Learning Apps for South Africa's 11 Languages
K53 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.
30 April 20266 min
The Routerless State Machine: Using Game Architecture as a Security Primitive
K53 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.
23 April 20266 min
The African Developer's Production Stack: Building for Load Shedding, 3G, and PayFast
Every 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.
19 March 20267 min
My First API Integration: Building a Weather App with SheCodes That Changed How I Think About Code
The 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.
9 March 20267 min
Green Vault: Building a PayFast-Integrated eCommerce Demo for the South African Market
Most 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.
9 March 20269 min
PoetryTube: Building the Video Poetry Platform African Poets Actually Deserve
Mainstream 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.
9 March 202611 min
Campus Compass: Building an AI Student Super-App for South Africa's 11 Million Varsity Students
South 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.
9 March 202614 min
How I Built K53 Drill Master: AI-Powered Driving Test Prep for 1.2 Million South Africans
South 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.
9 March 202612 min
The PayFast Universal Hub: One Webhook, Six Applications, Zero Leakage
PayFast 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.
9 March 20267 min