40 systems-design lessons
Filter by discipline, or browse all. Each article links through to the live Zuma module — or the Mr Bismarck webhosting billing platform — it's drawn from.
ERP
From Input to Offtake: Credit and Logistics on One Rail
Connecting farm inputs, financing and buyers into a single operational chain instead of three separate ones.
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ERP
30-Minute Delivery Windows: The Ops Behind the Promise
What live tracking actually requires from routing and rider allocation, not just a map pin.
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ERP
Menus, Orders and Payouts: The Operator's Back Office
Why restaurant partners need their own ERP view, not just a listing page on someone else's app.
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ERP
Send Anything, Track Everything: Courier at City Scale
Parcel state machines that never leave a customer guessing where their order is.
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ERP
Freight, Customs and Warehousing on One Operational Rail
Moving logistics from spreadsheets-and-WhatsApp into a trackable system of record.
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ERP
Project-Based Expertise Needs a Project-Based Contract Engine
Milestone-based payment logic for consulting work that isn't a simple fixed order.
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ERP
Real Vacancies, No Application Fees: Designing Out a Scam Pattern
Job-board architecture that removes the exact mechanism fraudulent listings rely on.
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Regulated Ops
Prescriptions, Doctors and Labs in One Checkout Flow
Coordinating three regulated service types under one order system without breaking compliance.
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Hosting providers, MSPs, data centres, and platform or marketplace businesses — anywhere billing, automation, payments or e-commerce logic needs to hold together at scale. Most of my clients are in East and Southern Africa, but the systems I build travel.
A short discovery call, a written scope covering the specific systems involved (billing, payments, automation, or e-commerce), then build in phases with checkpoints — so you see working software early, not just a plan.
Both. I run implementation and ongoing monitoring/support packages, particularly for data-centre and hosting-automation engagements — sized by server count, from small providers to enterprise data centres.
Remotely, primarily. Most engagements are scoped and delivered without needing to be on-site, though I'm based in Nairobi and can meet in person for clients in the region if that's useful for discovery or handover.
I built my own hosting billing platform, Imara Cloud, specifically because off-the-shelf billing tools don't close the gap between what's invoiced and what's actually provisioned. I can also work inside a client's existing stack when migration isn't practical.
Yes — M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, Tigo Pesa, HaloPesa, Stripe and card rails, reconciled into a single ledger rather than left as six disconnected integrations. This is the same architecture behind Zuma's multi-currency wallet.
Yes. The ERP pattern behind Zuma — billing, inventory, logistics and support tied into one system of record — applies well beyond hosting, and I've used it for education, tourism and non-profit platforms too.
It starts with mapping which incident types are safe to automate versus which always need a human sign-off — the same L1/L2/L3 governance model behind AIOP. From there it's integration work against your existing panel (cPanel/WHM, DirectAdmin, Proxmox) and monitoring stack, not a rip-and-replace.
It depends on scope — a billing-automation fix is priced differently from a full multi-vertical ERP build. I scope and quote after the discovery call rather than off a fixed rate card, since the right structure (fixed-price phase vs. ongoing retainer) depends on what's being built.
Access to whatever systems are in scope (panel, billing platform, payment provider dashboards) and one point of contact who can make product decisions during the discovery phase. I'll flag anything else specific once the scope is clear.
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