40 systems-design lessons
Filter by discipline, or browse all. Each article links through to the live Zuma module — or the Mr Bismarck webhosting billing platform — it's drawn from.
Travel & Culture
Booking Africa's Highest-Value Travel Product Direct From Source
Cutting out middlemen markup in a category built on trust and operator reputation.
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Payments
Booking a Flight With the Money You Already Have
Ticketing checkout that accepts wallet balances, not just international cards.
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ERP
Schedules and Status as an Information Layer, Not a Product
Why some modules exist purely to make every other module more reliable.
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Payments
Tickets That Can't Be Forged, Money That Reaches the Organiser
Cryptographic ticketing tied directly to settlement, cutting out resale fraud.
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Travel & Culture
Ticketing Live Performance the Same Way as a Flight
Applying inventory-and-seat-map discipline to theatre and spoken word.
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Travel & Culture
Showtimes and Seats, Without the Queue
Cinema booking logic built for peak-hour demand spikes.
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ERP
Streaming African Stories, Monetised Locally
Content monetisation that doesn't depend on a foreign ad-tech stack.
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Payments
Making Emergency Giving Traceable, Without Making It Slow
Donation flows that satisfy accountability without adding friction at the worst moment.
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Hosting providers, MSPs, data centres, and platform or marketplace businesses — anywhere billing, automation, payments or e-commerce logic needs to hold together at scale. Most of my clients are in East and Southern Africa, but the systems I build travel.
A short discovery call, a written scope covering the specific systems involved (billing, payments, automation, or e-commerce), then build in phases with checkpoints — so you see working software early, not just a plan.
Both. I run implementation and ongoing monitoring/support packages, particularly for data-centre and hosting-automation engagements — sized by server count, from small providers to enterprise data centres.
Remotely, primarily. Most engagements are scoped and delivered without needing to be on-site, though I'm based in Nairobi and can meet in person for clients in the region if that's useful for discovery or handover.
I built my own hosting billing platform, Imara Cloud, specifically because off-the-shelf billing tools don't close the gap between what's invoiced and what's actually provisioned. I can also work inside a client's existing stack when migration isn't practical.
Yes — M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa, HaloPesa, Stripe and card rails, reconciled into a single ledger rather than left as six disconnected integrations. This is the same architecture behind Zuma's multi-currency wallet.
Yes. The ERP pattern behind Zuma — billing, inventory, logistics and support tied into one system of record — applies well beyond hosting, and I've used it for education, tourism and non-profit platforms too.
It starts with mapping which incident types are safe to automate versus which always need a human sign-off — the same L1/L2/L3 governance model behind AIOP. From there it's integration work against your existing panel (cPanel/WHM, DirectAdmin, Proxmox) and monitoring stack, not a rip-and-replace.
It depends on scope — a billing-automation fix is priced differently from a full multi-vertical ERP build. I scope and quote after the discovery call rather than off a fixed rate card, since the right structure (fixed-price phase vs. ongoing retainer) depends on what's being built.
Access to whatever systems are in scope (panel, billing platform, payment provider dashboards) and one point of contact who can make product decisions during the discovery phase. I'll flag anything else specific once the scope is clear.
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