About

I’m Tawanda.

At my core, I’m a writer. Over years of writing and coding, I have found that the same patterns mostly apply. This blog is a place for me to do both.

During the day, I build Shopify apps at Zapiet, helping restaurant merchants handle complex pickup and delivery logistics. Outside of that, I’m usually deep in a side project, writing about what I’m learning on this blog, or reading everything from technical architecture to the philosophy of technology.

I started with Linux about four years ago - self-hosting projects that broke constantly. From each failure, I learned something. Now I deploy Dockerized applications to production servers I manage myself handling thousands of concurrent users.

I think deeply about technology, but I don’t get stuck there. My blog reflects this: posts about development sit next to devops tutorials and essays on how we build systems that matter. I learn quickly, and lately I’ve been pursuing my interest in high performance computing and distributed systems.

I’ve also had short fiction published in Literary Heist, Ab Terra, and Rush Magazine.

I work primarily with Laravel, TypeScript, and Go (with some Python sprinkled in). I’m multilingual (Shona, English, Chinese), based in Harare, Zimbabwe with my wife, and a lifelong Manchester City supporter.

Projects Showcase #

RivalSpy (live) - Fantasy Premier League analytics for tracking mini-league rivals. Built with Laravel, deployed with Kamal.

Doorman (GitHub) - Lightweight self-hosted analytics in Go (30MB RAM vs. hundreds for alternatives) with SQLite support. Also available as a Laravel package (GitHub).

Space is big (GitHub) - A solar system distance visualiser built with Rust+WASM. This project is a reconstruction/modernisation of a project I originally built (in C++) for my computer graphics class ~2021.

Professional Experience #

Fullstack Developer #

Zapiet | November 2023 - Present
PHP (Laravel) | TypeScript (React) | Docker | GraphQL

Implemented map-based delivery validation (vs. radius calculations), reducing customer support disputes
Increased test coverage to 95% for critical components
Improved database query performance by 50%
Migrated from deprecated REST to Shopify GraphQL API

Software Developer #

Chesco Tech | October 2022 - November 2023
PHP | Java (Spring) | TypeScript (React & React Native)

Built cross-platform mobile app serving 1000+ concurrent users with 99.9% uptime
Migrated legacy PHP application, implementing prepared statements that reduced security incidents by 80%
Developed HR time-tracking system improving compensation accuracy by 60%

Writing #

Fiction published in:

Technical writing and essays live on this blog.

My reading list collects books I think everyone should read.

Contact #

For business inquiries: projects@webbe.dev