A wing of the house

The Forge

The garden is where she writes. This is where she builds.

Not a portfolio. A workshop — the drafts, the wrong turns, and the night something broke at two in the morning along with the reason it broke. Code here is a medium, the same way a poem is.

Measured, not stated

3 098

commits

Read from the GitHub API when the site is built, across twelve repositories.

11

builds journalled

99k

words of build journal

Longer than the poetry collection.

9

foundation projects

Working on a stoep overlooking a garden and fountain
The office is a camping chair, a stoep, a hotel lobby, and a desk beside a printer at ten at night.
Where it happens

There is no studio.

Eight products, three thousand commits, and not one of them written in an office. The photographs on this page are the actual working conditions: a laptop on a camp chair in the middle of a lawn, a stoep with a view of a fountain, a hotel lobby between other things, a printer and a notebook at an hour when nobody replies to anything.

It matters because it is the constraint the whole practice is shaped around. Load shedding is not a translation string here. Mobile data has a price. A build that assumes a stable desk and a fast line is a build for somewhere else.

Every number in this wing is measured from the repositories at build time — never typed into a sentence and left to drift.

A laptop on a camping chair on a lawn under a palm tree
learning to code
Code on screen, lit magenta
Two in the morning, and the compiler is the only thing still answering.

Carved into the wall

Nine principles, learned the expensive way.

  1. 01Emotional architecture before technical implementation.
  2. 02WhatsApp is the SA UX pattern — integrate or be irrelevant here.
  3. 03PayFast ITN is the foundation of SA commerce — learn it once, deploy it everywhere.
  4. 04Database primitives before application code.
  5. 05Zero dependencies is a feature for the right context.
  6. 06Client work seeds product ideas — every manual SME process is a future feature.
  7. 07Clone to learn, not to copy.
  8. 08Accessibility is a quality standard, not a feature.
  9. 09The personal project is the most differentiated.

If a room starts arguing for her, it belongs on the other site.

The rule this whole wing is built on

The rooms

Nine doors. Seven of them open.

Where It Started

Nine foundation projects. The sequence is the argument.

The Workshop Floor

Every build, one dossier each — the problem, the decisions, the cost.

The Scar Room

What broke. How it was found. Why the system allowed it.

The Long Night

The diary. Night by night, newest first.

The Commit Wall

A year of commit messages, read as sentences.

The Making

The career feature — zero to eight live products in a year.

The Poet Who Codes

The doorway between this wing and the garden.

The Bench

in the fire

Live vitals — apps breathing, deploys landing.

The Dojo

in the fire

Drills. Guess the bug. Read the trace.

Where they came from