thelowlydev — v0.1
Architect by day. Builder by night. Strong opinions about contract-first design, event-driven systems, and the kind of small, sharp tools that change how you think.
About
I'm a senior fullstack engineer working as an architect at a large organisation in South Africa. I've shipped systems in Go, Rust, Node, C#, Java, and a small library of opinions about how teams should ship software.
My day job is contracts, events, design docs, and the patient work of turning ambiguous business goals into systems that won't embarrass anyone in two years. My nights are messier — I'm probably building something I have no business building, in a language I had no business picking, because the problem looked interesting at 22:00.
I like small tools, ambient interfaces, design systems that breathe, and the kind of code that reads like prose. I do not like "move fast, break things" as a value system.
If you write specs before code, draw diagrams before specs, and argue about naming things — we'll probably get along.
Computing should feel like furniture, not television. The best software is the kind you barely notice until you need it — small surfaces, fast paths, low cognitive tax. I keep coming back to wearables, tiny watches, peripheral displays.
Most of what makes software feel alive is not pixels — it's other humans. I'm fascinated by the design language of presence, the etiquette of shared sessions, and the engineering of soft real-time systems that don't crumble at scale.
A design system is not a Figma file. It's a contract between code and design, with its own metabolism, its own drift, and its own immune system. I treat tokens, components, and the bridge between them as a first-class engineering domain.
I will fight you over OpenAPI. Contract-first design is not a process tax — it's the cheapest way to find a bad idea before it becomes a bad codebase. Specs are how senior teams move fast.
The interesting question is not 'can the model write the code'. It's 'what's the smallest unit of human judgement a model needs to defer to'. I'm building rituals around plan-first, review-second, execute-third.
Most systems should be a polite conversation between domains, not a centralised orchestrator with a god complex. Kafka, NATS, durable workflows — whatever the substrate, the discipline is the same: name the verbs, version the contracts, never block.
Contact
I read everything. I reply to things that earn a reply. Pitches with a clear ask welcome — recruiter spam less so.