IAN ADERA
Senior full-stack developer in Nairobi. Seven years of shipping: insurance platforms at Britam, AI research tools, and scroll-driven brand sites you can open right now.
Britam, Senior Software Developer, Sept 2024 to present.
- Location
- Nairobi, EAT UTC+3
- Status
- Open to remote
- Claims on this page
- Linked below
- Adjectives on faith
- 0
Full-stack since Jan 2019. Azure certified. Moringa School alumnus. Mentor, Google Africa Developer Scholarship. Writes Dev Genus on Medium (10k+ reads).
Work
Six things I have shipped, in the order I would show a client. Five answered when I checked on 9 September 2026. One did not, and says so.
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Brand Site · Generative Film
NKOLONG
Follow the sun across the Mara. A dawn-to-dusk safari film scrubs frame-by-frame with your scroll, four AI-generated legs resting exactly on storyboard-approved frames, then a balloon flight and a bush breakfast take over the screen.
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Brand Site
ANASA Heights
Scroll-scrubbed flight film for a 34-floor residential tower in Westlands, 112 residences. The video seeks frame-by-frame with scroll position while the hard numbers stay reachable at every pause.
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Generative Media
Nairobi Iconic Buildings
Scroll to fly through a folded-paper Nairobi, ten landmark towers in one continuous camera flight, stitched from six AI-generated video legs and scrubbed by scroll position.
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Brand Site
Chipukizi
Nursery school site for ages 1–6 in Nairobi. A hand-drawn character tracks the cursor across the hero as you move, and smooth scroll carries you through the day, the classes and booking a visit.
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AI · RAG
Vector11
Monochrome football intelligence chat. A RAG pipeline over football news and stats answers matchday questions with tactical, data-aware responses instead of generic summaries.
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AI · Legal Tech
DiraAi
AI legal research for Kenya. Ask a question, get an answer where every claim links back to the actual Act or judgment it came from, verifiable in one click. A LangGraph agent over a Chroma vector index and a Neo4j citation graph, with Cohere reranking and Celery workers doing the ingest.
Not linkable yet, so listed, not claimed.
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AI · Agentic Platform
Operon
Agentic platform for people who run their own business. Syncs Gmail, LinkedIn and WhatsApp, works out who is owed a follow-up, and hands you one prioritised queue each morning instead of four inboxes, then drafts the reply and tracks the outcome.
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Mobile · Fintech
PesaWallet
Personal finance for the way money actually moves in Kenya. Reads bank and M-Pesa SMS on-device and turns them into real transaction analytics, no bank API, nothing leaves the phone.
Career
Lead development for enterprise-grade insurance platforms using Next.js and TypeScript. Design scalable React architectures aligned with business and regulatory requirements, manage Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, and containerize applications with Docker across high-traffic production systems.
Next.js, TypeScript, Azure DevOps, Docker
Delivered scalable frontend features for a high-traffic streaming platform across web, TV, and mobile surfaces. Partnered with cross-functional agile teams to translate requirements into reliable web solutions and improve performance and stability.
React, TypeScript, CI/CD
Managed GCP resources and led a team of developers. Engineered high-performance APIs with Node.js and built MVC frameworks.
GCP, Node.js, Doppler
Implemented UI designs in React Native and Next.js. Created GraphQL mutations for robust data interaction and managed AWS resources.
React Native, GraphQL, AWS
Authored technical articles achieving over 10,000+ reads, translating complex software concepts for diverse audiences.
Technical Writing, Mentorship
Reduced hosting costs by 70% via migration to Digital Ocean. Automated CI/CD pipelines reducing manual work by 90%.
Digital Ocean, Jenkins, AdonisJs
Writing
Dev Genus on Medium: essays on Claude Code, prompting and model routing, written for working developers.
Out of the box the answers are long, hedged and full of jargon. Cutting them down to something a busy developer will actually read.
Claude, Prompting
Claude Code: From Chatbot to System
I lost an afternoon re-explaining the same setup. Turning a chat window into a configured system that remembers between sessions.
Claude Code, Workflow
Two hours into my first real session I had a bug in auth code I could not explain, and I had not written a line of it.
Claude Code, AI
Stop Sending Every Task to Opus
One model for everything is the expensive default. Routing work by strength and cost instead, and what it actually saves.
Models, Cost
Make Another AI Kill Your Plan First
My plan passed a 12-point review. Then Codex told me not to ship it. Adversarial review before you write any code.
Review, Codex
Stop Making Claude Smarter. Make It Remember.
The best upgrade to an AI coding setup is not chasing the newest frontier model, it is giving the one you have a memory.
Memory, AI
Stack
- Frontend
- React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Flutter, Dart, Svelte, Angular, Lovable, Vue.js, Redux, Figma
- Backend
- Node.js, Golang, Python, FastAPI, Supabase, Express.js, AdonisJs, REST API, WebSockets, GraphQL
- DevOps
- AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Jenkins, Bash, CI/CD, Digital Ocean
- Database & AI
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Neo4j, LangGraph, Prompt Engineering, SQL, NoSQL
- Tools
- VS Code, Claude Code, Codex, Higgsfield AI, Git, Postman, Figma, Vercel, Linux