I build web platforms in Kenya — and then I run them.
Most engineers hand a repository over and leave. I stay on the pager. Everything below is in production right now, on infrastructure I still own the incidents for.
Senior Engineer on the web platform at Piedmont Global, and founder of Lock & Mercer, the Nairobi studio behind SpaceYako. TypeScript and Node across the stack; Postgres and MySQL underneath; M-Pesa, broadcast feeds and low-bandwidth Kenya as the constraints that actually shape the work.
Four platforms in production. Live domains, not case-study screenshots.
A property marketplace for Kenya where agents pay to list, seekers never pay, and no money moves between users.
Verification is keyed to the expiry date on an agent's practising certificate — the badge removes itself when the certificate lapses, so nobody has to remember to revoke it.
An independent Kenyan business publication, rebuilt as a server-rendered newsroom.
The deliverable on that migration was not the design — it was the verified redirect map. Every legacy URL resolves, so a decade of archive kept its search history.
A radio station broadcasting across Western Kenya and the North Rift.
The site reads on-air state and now-playing from the broadcast itself, so the page and the transmitter never disagree about what is happening.
The Consumers Federation of Kenya — a rebuild for an audience that arrives on whatever connection it has.
Performance budget set against the connection people actually have, not the one the office wifi shows. Weight measured on 3G, not on a Lighthouse run.
A selection — six of 19 here. Solid cards are mine. Dashed cards are studio notes that live on Lock & Mercer.
A property platform for Kenya, where the fraud is specific: stolen photographs and lapsed licences. Three mechanisms, one structural decision, and why the badge has to expire without anyone remembering to remove it.
Most Daraja tutorials stop at a successful STK Push in sandbox. This is the rest of it: token caching, callback verification, idempotent writes and the failure modes that only show up with real money.
Usually replies in about two hours. A real number, computed from real data, and an agent could produce it without ever answering anybody. The problem was what we let count as a reply.
An in-memory limiter on serverless does not limit to your number. It limits to your number times however many instances happen to be warm, and it forgets everything when one recycles.
The nightly batch caught every error properly, logged it properly, and recorded it in the response. What it never did was tell a human. One of those jobs carries a statutory deadline.
Saved-search alerts, price drops, viewing reminders: every notification the product was proudest of went out by email, in a market where almost everyone online is on WhatsApp every single day.
Why a migration is finished when the old URLs resolve, not when the design ships.
The number that pays is also an identifier. Treat it like one.
Verification that cannot be revoked is decoration.
DNS, certificates and mail, in the order that keeps a business trading.
Where image pipelines duplicate work, and what it costs per month.
Reading broadcast state so the website cannot contradict the transmitter.
Designing to the median Kenyan connection instead of the office one.
Eight years of production work, agency through platform engineering.
Client sites, agency years and open source. Not operated from here — the pager for these belongs to someone else.
Kenya’s largest telco and the home of M-Pesa — web engineering on the public estate during the agency years.
The telco’s press and stories platform, publishing daily.
Image compression that binary-searches quality until the file is as small as the eye allows. Next.js and Sharp.
Performance governance for WordPress: scheduled Lighthouse audits in the lab, web-vitals from real visitors, one report.
The public banking site of one of Kenya’s largest banks — engineering from the agency years.
The bank’s arm for Kenyans banking from abroad.
A unified AI workspace: engagement, social content, learning and productivity under one roof.
Three years here as a fullstack engineer — the marketing-technology agency’s own site included.
A digital transformation agency’s web presence.
A directory for finding a therapist, serving the whole of Denmark.
The person behind the pager. Colour returns on hover.
Short answers to the things people actually search.
Godwill Barasa is a senior software engineer based in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2025 he has been Senior Engineer, Web Platform at Piedmont Global Language Solutions in Fairfax, Virginia, working remotely. He is also the founder of Lock & Mercer, a Nairobi venture studio where he runs technology, and holds a BBIT from JKUAT (2022).
Godwill Barasa is Senior Engineer, Web Platform at Piedmont Global Language Solutions, based in Fairfax, Virginia, a role he has held since 2025 and works remotely from Nairobi. Before that he was a Senior Front End Engineer at Ogilvy (2024 to 2025), working remotely with its Cape Town office.
Web Engineer Intern at Procter & Gamble, Nairobi (2018). Mobile Engineer at Legibra, Nairobi (2019 to 2021). Fullstack Engineer at Belva Digital, Nairobi (2021 to 2024). Senior Front End Engineer at Ogilvy, remote with Cape Town (2024 to 2025). Senior Engineer, Web Platform at Piedmont Global (2025 to now). He also founded Lock & Mercer, where he runs technology.
Godwill Barasa started as a domain reseller and built websites for his school, for churches and organisations in Kakamega town, and for Double Shutter Limited. His first engineering role was a web engineering internship at Procter & Gamble in Nairobi in 2018.
Godwill Barasa holds a Bachelor of Business Information Technology (BBIT) from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), completed in 2022 while he was working as a Fullstack Engineer at Belva Digital in Nairobi.
Lock & Mercer is a venture studio in Nairobi, Kenya, founded by Godwill Barasa, who runs its technology. It owns and operates SpaceYako, a property platform for Kenya, and builds and runs web platforms for Kenyan publishers, broadcasters and organisations, including Business Report, Khendo FM and COFEK.
He built and operates SpaceYako, a property platform for Kenya; rebuilt Business Report, an independent Kenyan business publication, as a server-rendered newsroom; migrated Khendo FM, a radio station in Western Kenya and the North Rift, off WordPress; and rebuilt cofek.africa for the Consumers Federation of Kenya.
Godwill Barasa writes about M-Pesa and the Safaricom Daraja API in production: STK Push, callbacks that never arrive, B2C payouts, refunds and reversals, idempotency and reconciliation, and going live. He also writes about running platforms after launch, from caching a newsroom traffic spike to monitoring that misses real failures.
Godwill Barasa works in React, Next.js, Laravel, WordPress, TypeScript, Sanity and Vercel, with Node.js on the server. His specialist area is M-Pesa Daraja API integration and payment reconciliation for Kenyan platforms.
Godwill Barasa is based in Nairobi, Kenya, on East Africa Time (UTC+3). He works remotely for a US employer and builds platforms for Kenyan organisations through Lock & Mercer.
Through the contact page at godwillbarasa.com/contact. He publishes as godwillcodes on GitHub and LinkedIn, and studio work runs through Lock & Mercer at lockandmercer.com.