Hassan Tsuma
I'm a backend and full-stack engineer in Kenya, and still a Computer Science student. Most of what I know about building real software didn't come from coursework. It came from building RentManager on my own, end to end, and running into the problems a tutorial never mentions.
I like problems where correctness matters more than shipping speed: money, records, anything a business cannot afford to get wrong. RentManager started out as "build a rental app" and became far more interesting the moment M-Pesa, Kenyan tax law and multi-tenant data isolation came into it. I didn't back away from that. I read Safaricom's merchant terms, read the Finance Act, and built a tax module that fails closed by default, because I'd rather under-compute than get a government filing wrong.
I won't tell you I'm an expert across a long list of technologies. I'm not yet, and the list wouldn't be honest. What I can say is that I've built one real system deeply enough to know where the hard problems live in software like this. It isn't the CRUD screens. It's the tenant boundary, the ledger, the idempotency guarantees, the things that are easy to get subtly wrong and expensive to have gotten wrong. I'm building depth by taking on harder versions of that same problem instead of collecting frameworks.
The part I'm proudest of isn't a feature. It's that the thing is deployed and running, across a web app, a native mobile app and the API underneath both. Getting there meant learning the parts nobody writes tutorials about: squeezing a Spring Boot service into 512 MB, keeping a free-tier container awake so M-Pesa callbacks don't hit a sleeping server, and scheduling the encrypted backups I still owe myself a restore drill on.
Outside RentManager I'm still working through the fundamentals properly. Data structures, algorithms and the JavaFX exercises on my GitHub are all part of that, and none of it is portfolio polish. Judge me on RentManager. That's the real thing.
What I'm looking for
My first serious engineering role, whether that's graduate, junior or an internship, backend or full-stack. I take on freelance and contract work alongside it. I can work remotely in any timezone from UTC+3, on-site in Kenya, or relocate for the right role. What I want most from the next step is to work with engineers who'll review my code and show me how a system behaves under real load. Building alone could never teach me that.