I'm Kolawole Lawal, a full-stack engineer with ~10 years of experience building SaaS products, APIs, and real-time systems. I've shipped for startups, open-source foundations, and my own ideas.
A mix of personal SaaS, client work, and collaborations — all built with real care.
My first personally shipped SaaS. A PDF reader where students and professionals can highlight text and instantly receive AI-generated explanations — in text or audio. Built for the African learner market.
lumiodocs.com →A social media scheduling and analytics SaaS built for Geebital. Full-stack with real-time publishing queues and multi-account management.
⬡ No longer liveEmail marketing SaaS built for Catex Technology. Handled architecture, infrastructure on AWS, and led a small team of junior developers.
⬡ No longer liveDesktop POS application for a Microsoft/Sage Partner. Built with Electron + Vue.js, integrated with Sage300WebAPI deployed on Microsoft Azure.
⬡ Internal / client toolBuilt partner/driver management, route tracking, and invoice modules for a logistics platform. Also shipped a custom WooCommerce plugin for Incredit payment gateway.
⬡ Client projectLead generation and growth automation SaaS. Built and maintained the full platform — from backend services to infrastructure — handling real user data at scale.
leadgrow360.com →Technical Fellow contributing on-screen keyboard support for Balinese and other languages, integrating Transkribus OCR, and shipping various platform improvements.
See contributions →An interactive 3D globe that lets you explore and stream live radio stations from around the world — filterable by region, country, and genre. Built for fun, because why not.
radioshuffle.kolakachi.com →A decade of building across the full stack — from database schema to CI/CD pipeline.
A career spanning engineering roles at NGOs, remote startups, and my own ventures.
Designing deterministic challenges to evaluate LLM code generation. Building self-validating Bash test suites and containerised evaluation environments. Iterative failure analysis to expose logic weaknesses in AI outputs.
Long-tenure role building and maintaining SaaS products (Uduala, LeadGrow, Mobimatic). Managed AWS infrastructure, built microservices in Node.js/TypeScript, and led deployments across LAMP stack environments.
Contributed on-screen keyboard support for Balinese and other underrepresented languages. Integrated Transkribus OCR into the Wikimedia platform and shipped various open-source improvements.
Built backend services, admin panels, and full applications in PHP/Laravel. Designed database architectures in Postgres and MySQL. Collaborated across the full development lifecycle.
Developed logistics platform modules in Laravel and built a custom WooCommerce plugin integrating the Incredit payment gateway with prefilled checkout flows.
Early-career role focused on writing testable code, integrating software components, debugging, and evaluating user feedback on deployed products.
I write about building software, SaaS lessons, and things I've had to figure out the hard way.
A real-world story of worker exhaustion, connection limits, and the architectural decision that changed how I build real-time features.
The full story — system design, picking the stack, building the spec, and what I'd do differently if I started over.
Moving off polling-based queues to proper Redis pub/sub in a production Laravel app — gotchas, patterns, and the final architecture.
I'm open to interesting contracts, collaborations, and conversations. If you have a hard problem that needs a builder — reach out.