Stanley Masinde

Career break from full-time employment. Actively supporting clients with custom software solutions and technical advisory for founders — Rust systems, full-stack products, and platform architecture on selective engagements.

• Founder Advisory: Technical sidekick for non-technical founders — stack selection, architecture, cloud cost optimisation, and hiring or evaluating developers.
• Chat Bots: Deterministic WhatsApp and Telegram bots — webhook handlers, state machines, and session persistence.
• Payments: M-Pesa and card gateway integration with webhook callbacks, idempotent settlement, and fulfillment on confirmed payment.
• Client Delivery: End-to-end software for clients including PWAs, production APIs, and integrated back-office tooling.
• Systems Consulting: Rust service design, performance optimization, async pipelines, and infrastructure for client codebases.
• Full-Stack: Vue/Nuxt frontends and Laravel or Rust backends when clients need a complete product shipped.

Built Rust-based systems for performance-critical data processing. Designed advanced coding assessments around Rust internals and mentored engineers on systems programming.

• Technical Assessment Design: Advanced coding assessments around Rust internals — ownership, lifetimes, async programming, and unsafe code patterns.
• Technical Mentorship: Live coding sessions, workshops, and technical evaluations for distributed engineering teams.
• Data Pipelines: Rust processing workflows for LLM training and evaluation (including RLHF).

Six years building production software for an agricultural marketplace — monolith to event-driven microservices across multi-region deployments. Migrated Node.js analytics to Rust/Tokio with async SQS consumers and custom retry logic.

• Performance Engineering: Rust/Tokio analytics service replacing Node.js — custom async retry with exponential backoff and backpressure handling.
• Microservices Architecture: Event-driven services with dedicated databases, API contracts, and independent deployment pipelines.
• Messaging Integrations: WhatsApp Business API and USSD gateway for multi-channel, stateful user flows.
• Infrastructure: Docker containerisation, blue-green deployments, Sentry monitoring, multi-region uptime tracking.

Deterministic conversational insurance platform on WhatsApp with integrated back office. Customers complete motor, health, and travel insurance purchases through rule-driven state-machine flows.

• State Machine Design: Meta webhook handler with server-side session persistence across multi-step insurance workflows
• Deterministic Flows: Explicit conversation states — not LLM-driven — with predictable transitions and recovery paths
• Integrations: M-Pesa and card payments, policy issuance APIs, and admin dashboard for conversation logs and analytics

Rust TUI application with modal state management and responsive terminal rendering. Demonstrates systems programming with complex event handling, memory-efficient string processing, and cross-platform binary distribution.

• TUI Architecture: Built with Ratatui and Crossterm for cross-platform terminal rendering with Vim-inspired modal interface
• Async HTTP: Tokio runtime for non-blocking HTTP requests with Reqwest client, supporting custom headers and request bodies
• State Management: Complex modal state handling with event-driven input processing and memory-efficient response caching

OAuth 1.0a implementation with Twitter API v2 integration. Multi-interface architecture (CLI + HTTP server) showing systems design thinking for different access patterns.

• Dual Interface Design: Axum web server with Tokio runtime serving JSON API endpoints alongside CLI interface
• Configuration Management: Serde-based TOML serialization with validation and secure credential handling
• Cross-Platform Distribution: Automated binary builds for Linux x64, macOS x64/ARM64 with static linking support

High-throughput Rust service using Tokio for concurrent SQS message processing. Handles business events (ORDER_PLACED, USER_REGISTERED) with fault tolerance and backpressure management.

• Async Processing: Concurrent SQS message handling with Tokio runtime
• Fault Tolerance: Custom async retry logic with exponential backoff and circuit breaker patterns
• Memory Safety: Rust's ownership model and efficient data structures for production event processing

Fast, offline image processing using WebAssembly for near-native performance in the browser. Written in Rust for memory safety and computational efficiency.

• WASM Optimization: Rust compilation to WebAssembly with wasm-pack for size-optimized binaries
• Memory Safety: Zero-copy image processing with Rust's ownership system preventing buffer overflows
• Performance: Near-native speed image transformations without server round-trips or external dependencies

Mobile Web Specialist

Google Africa Scholarship via Udacity • Andela Learning Community (August 2018)

Completed intensive program covering advanced JavaScript, ES6+ features, Promises, Service Workers, and progressive web app development. Foundation for understanding async patterns later applied in Rust/Tokio development.

Conference Speaking

• Founded structured open source community providing first team development experience for developers
• Coordinated collaborative development across 30+ repositories including deployment tools and system utilities
• Served as professional reference for community members using contributions as proof of team experience

"Let us talk about bitwise operations"

Medium, April 2025 • Systems Programming Deep-Dive • Read Article

Comprehensive exploration of bitwise operations from first principles, covering binary number systems, CPU-level optimizations, and practical applications. Demonstrates understanding of low-level computing concepts with Rust examples and real-world use cases in embedded systems and performance-critical code.

"SSH Deployment with GitHub Actions"

Medium, February 2023 • Infrastructure Automation • Read Article

Comprehensive technical guide solving secure CI/CD deployment challenges. Covers SSH key management in dynamic GitHub Actions environments, secure server access patterns, and automated deployment workflows. Demonstrates systems thinking in infrastructure automation and production deployment strategies.