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K
Email

3+

Years shipping

5+

Production apps delivered

10+

Public repos on GitHub

Hello

I am Kupela Phiri, a full-stack software engineer in Lusaka, ZM and Johannesburg, ZA.

I like pretty things that work.

Scroll to the work
Kupela Phiri, full-stack software engineer

Open to full-time roles & freelance

Kupela beside the AWS Summit Johannesburg signage at the venue entrance

AWS Summit, Johannesburg

Kupela at the Platteklip Gorge trail sign, partway up Table Mountain

Platteklip Gorge

Selected work

Work

01 — Full-Stack Developer · 2024 – Present

Sosticky.io

LIVE

A multi-tenant customer engagement and loyalty platform for retail and hospitality brands, spanning email, SMS and push notification campaigns.

  • Cut resource load by 60% by optimising the cron job that segments customers within each workspace.
  • Added saved progress to the email campaign builder so users can resume a multi-step campaign where they left off.
  • Own the CI/CD pipeline in GitHub Actions, with automated tests and deploys to AWS (EC2, S3, CloudFront).
  • NestJS
  • React
  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • AWS
Visit site

See everything on GitHub

Plus the half-finished experiments, which are usually the interesting ones.

Tools of the trade

Skills

Reach for these daily

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • Node.js
  • NestJS
  • Go
  • C#
  • Python
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • GraphQL
  • Redis
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • GitHub Actions
  • Linux

Away from the desk

  • Kupela on a cobbled street in Bo-Kaap, in front of a bright blue house with the quarter's painted houses behind

    Bo-Kaap, Cape Town

  • Kupela in a hard hat, hi-vis vest and safety harness on a building site, crouched beside a power drill

    Volunteering

  • Kupela at a high window in Ponte Tower looking out over the Johannesburg skyline, the Hillbrow Tower on the horizon

    Ponte Tower, Joburg

Depth

Frontend92

React, Next.js, React Native

Backend & APIs85

Node, NestJS, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis

DevOps & cloud72

AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions

Percentages in a portfolio are marketing. Read these as what I would happily be on call for.

How we got here

About

Full-stack dev. 3+ years of shipping. I care about the seams nobody sees.

Based in Lusaka and Johannesburg, building things that are as well-engineered under the hood as they look on screen. 3+ years of writing code professionally, across a multi-tenant SaaS platform, freelance client work and my own open-source tools.

I specialise in TypeScript, React and Node.js, but the language matters less than the seams — the error states, the migration path, the thing that breaks at 3am. I care about developer experience, performance, and shipping work that actually gets used.

Years coding
3+Years coding
Client apps delivered
5+Client apps delivered
Cron load cut at Sticky Cards
60%Cron load cut at Sticky Cards

Elsewhere, lately

  • Kupela at the waterline on the beach at Camps Bay, Cape Town

    Camps Bay

  • Kupela at the summit wall on Table Mountain, looking out over Cape Town and Table Bay

    Table Mountain summit

Currently building

  • Starlink capacity notifierIN PROGRESS
  • Freetier dependency pingerIN REVIEW
  • Portfolio redesignSHIPPED

git status — 3 active branches

Currently reading

Thinking with Type

Ellen Lupton

And thinking hard about every font I use.

Off the clock

Creating content, cooking well, and rebuilding my keyboard firmware for no good reason.

Send word

Let's talk

Open for full-time roles, freelance work, and interesting problems. Available to work US time zones, including Pacific mornings. I answer everything within 24 hours.

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