Godwill Barasa

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 from Nairobi, and he is the founder of Lock & Mercer, a venture studio in Nairobi where he runs technology. He builds web platforms for Kenyan audiences and then stays on to operate them, which is the part of the job most of this site is about.

Four platforms carry his work. SpaceYako is a property platform for Kenya, owned and operated by the studio, where agent standing is computed from the expiry date on a practising certificate so a badge cannot outlive the credential behind it. Business Report, an independent Kenyan business publication, he rebuilt as a server-rendered newsroom and moved across on a redirect map verified against production. Khendo FM, a radio station across Western Kenya and the North Rift, came off WordPress onto a site that reads on-air state from the broadcast itself. COFEK, the Consumers Federation of Kenya, was rebuilt for the connection its readers actually have.

Running a platform after launch changes what gets built before it. On SpaceYako no money moves between users, which removes escrow and deposit disputes from the product entirely. On Business Report the migration counted as finished when every indexed URL resolved or redirected against the live site — and then certificate renewal lapsed after the cutover, so the site looked down from outside while mail was up throughout, which moved certificate issuance into the cutover itself rather than the week after it.

The work covers product engineering, editorial platforms and newsroom CMS, broadcast web systems, site migration, web performance and infrastructure cost, technical SEO, and trust and verification systems.

He writes about the engineering underneath, mostly M-Pesa and Safaricom’s Daraja API, because in Kenya the payment rail is where platforms break. Those pieces are collected in the engineering record. Shorter studio notes on migrations, verification and image pipelines are published at Lock & Mercer.

The work started before the record does. He began as a domain reseller, and built websites for his school, churches and local organisations around Kakamega town, and Double Shutter Limited. Reselling led to an internship, the internship to a confirmed position, and the record below runs on from there. He holds a Bachelor of Business Information Technology (BBIT) from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), completed in 2022.

His earlier work was at Ogilvy, Belva Digital, Legibra and Procter & Gamble, set out with dates below. He works in React, Next.js, Laravel, WordPress, TypeScript, Sanity and Vercel.