Umwayi means shepherd
I tend what I learn and put it to work.
Backend engineer in Nairobi. I write about philosophy, tech and journaling, and use what I learn to reach my goals.
Four things I try to understand
Each one feeds the next. Pick one to see how I practice it.
A daily entry. What I did, what I felt, what I learned.
Build it, break it, then write down why it broke.
Read one idea, then ask who it helps and who it leaves out.
Every lesson ends with one change to tomorrow's routine.
The journal sits at the center.
Every entry feeds the rest. An idea becomes an article. A lesson becomes a habit. A problem becomes a project.
- Observe
- Write
- Connect
- Apply
The source of truth. Every day starts or ends here.
Questions from the journal become articles on how to think and live.
Problems I hit at work become articles on systems, data and AI.
Conversations and reading become notes on how others see the world.
Lessons become code, routines and tools I use every day.
Open threads
- career prep Whether the register-calibration read holds outside indexing, tested against other topics.
- career prep Whether the self-prediction-of-losing-the-audience pattern shows up outside technical explanations, which would connect it to a past interview's feedback rather than keep them separate.
Writing
Recent articles
Articles on how to think and live.
- Appearance versus reality, from three lines in an interview Nov 2026 · 2 min
- Do the rules that stop an AI also stop us? Nov 2026 · 4 min
- Come with a question, not a verdict Nov 2026 · 3 min
Articles on backend systems, data and AI.
- I cut my CI wait from 25 minutes to about 12 and checked that no test was dropped Nov 2026 · 6 min
- Building the Umwayi hub landing page on Founding.dev: what happened and how we responded Nov 2026 · 4 min
- A Folder Is Not a Brain Until You Measure It Oct 2026 · 6 min
Articles drawn from my daily entries.
- Looking, not reading the code Sep 2026 · 1 min
- A line that wasn't Seneca's Sep 2026 · 1 min
- Three questions, cold Sep 2026 · 1 min
What I'm building
Settlement Engine
A live, deployed idempotent settlement and reconciliation engine, all nine build phases complete.
Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Kafka, FastAPI, Next.js, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry
Read the case studyRoutine Machine
An AI project that logs daily routines and learning, detects patterns, and runs a fixed schedule through its own tracking frontend.
Spring Boot, FastAPI, Python, Next.js
Follow the buildThis website
The site you're reading: a static Astro site with a shepherd theme, its content kept as markdown in UMWAYI and rebuilt on every change.
Astro, Tailwind CSS, daisyUI, GitHub Pages, Waline
How it's builtUMWAYI
The hub behind this site. One master file holds my context. Journal entries update the projects they touch, and every sync is logged.
Markdown, Git
Read about the hubNow
Updated September 2026.
- Working
- Backend engineer at Global Link+, a logistics ERP startup
- Reading
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Building
- Routine Machine and this website
- Based in
- Nairobi, Kenya