building necessary software. @screensaverso @calckenya
Nairobi, Kenya
Joined August 2017
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"Deliver impactful value upfront , with the least effort for people , in the shortest time possible"
This applies in so many areas in life.
Back then pulling off such automation felt like magic to stakeholders. You’d often find underneath big orgs , that hacky solution a dev built that literally prints the company money.
Even when there is no public API integration to X , the automation gods will find a way.
Pre mpesa API days, we built a bot that ran on a windows VM, taught it how to open a browser, navigate to the mpesa website, pick a previously FTPd excel file, picked transactions and manually created B2C requests. Reconciliation was a nightmare 😔😔. When Mpesa G2 arrived in 2015 it was such a relief.
Common SDE roles (Frontend/Backend/Mobile) are still generally around though would recommend folks to grow upwards towards DevOps/Infra/SRE works.
Its a common career progression if you want to head towards Tech Lead,Eng Manager,Staff Eng,Principal Eng,CTO.
Something happening more these days is that most of these tech mgmt roles are slowly being moved towards being ICs.
Having enough context to know how to build and grow company tech architecture,IP and teams while still occasionally having bandwidth to send a PR to center a div lol
David Amunga ⚡️ retweeted
if “chances are slim” and “fat chance” both mean the odds are stacked against you, what is the ideal BMI of fate
David Amunga ⚡️ retweeted
Today I'm launching @testergig
Google Play makes new developers find 12 testers for 14 straight days before they can even apply to go live
I built TesterGig to connect them with real Kenyans who test their apps every day, and get paid straight to M-Pesa
testergig.com
messed around and ported standby @screensaverso into Omarchy 😎
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
David Amunga ⚡️ retweeted
they don’t tell you this, but when you become a staff engineer they expect you to perform 1 miracle a year
David Amunga ⚡️ retweeted
I'm very sensitive to this feeling, cause I've been there.
Someone does something cool, gets a lot of attention, and you're frustrated cause you already did it, a while ago.
It's not enough to do things, you must also tell people.
Maybe it's not fair, but it's true
David Amunga ⚡️ retweeted
new post: the senior engineer death spiral
sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senio…
a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.
this saas packs some underrated value ( both the bnb mgmt + custom booking site )
good work and success in reaching more folks who’ll love this 👏
Could have been cuddled up right now but currently headed deep inside Muthiga to shoot a client's bnb for their hostsasa.app website
David Amunga ⚡️ retweeted
People rewrite in Rust or Go and claim that as the reason for huge performance gains, at face value that's cool but when looking at what actually makes stuff faster it's almost never the language. A small thread.
ported kenya-locations into a flutter lib sometime last week :
props to @swagsonengine for the extra help on this.
🔗 pub.dev/packages/kenya_locat… – at Nairobi, Kenya