Paul Murithi Kirera

@paul-murithi

BSc IT Student • Aspiring AI & Backend Engineer

Joined October 2025

Paul Murithi Kirera's blogs

From Zero to Flask: My Web Dev Kickofffrom-zero-to-flask.hashnode.dev1 post

Week 1: Beyond Docker Composebuilding-a-5-service-local-appliance.hashnode.dev1 post

Week 2: Migration Engine Setupbuilding-a-production-migration-system.hashnode.dev1 post

Week 3: The Ingestion Layerweek-3-the-ingestion-layer.hashnode.dev1 post

Week 4: The Art of Tracethe-art-of-trace.hashnode.dev1 post

Recently published

week-5-the-transactional-state-machine.hashnode.dev

The Transactional State Machine: Designing for Deterministic Failure

Sim-Pesa Build Log — Week 5 of 16 We are now at the start of Phase 2, and this week had zero new code committed. Instead, it was pure architecture work; the slow, deliberate kind of design that determines whether the implementation phase goes smooth...

5d ago7 min read

the-art-of-trace.hashnode.dev

Week 4: The Art of the Trace

The Black Box Problem For most of my development career, logging was an afterthought. Sprinkle a few console.log() statements here and there, ship it, move on. It worked well enough for small projects. But Sim-Pesa—my local M-Pesa transaction applian...

Feb 137 min read

week-3-the-ingestion-layer.hashnode.dev

Week 3: Building the Core API endpoint

Week three of building SimPesa marked a critical milestone: creating the ingestion engine, the system that accepts STK Push requests and ensures they're processed reliably. This wasn't about building something that "works most of the time." In fintec...

Feb 47 min read

building-a-production-migration-system.hashnode.dev

Week 2: Building a Production Migration System

The Moment of Doubt I stared at my Week 2 roadmap with equal parts excitement and dread. The task was clear: design the database schema for Sim-Pesa, write migration scripts, and verify everything via the PostgreSQL CLI. Simple on paper. Terrifying i...

Jan 318 min read

building-a-5-service-local-appliance.hashnode.dev

Beyond docker-compose up: Building a 5-Service Local Appliance

Chapter 1: The Vision & The Stack In 2026, I decided to bridge the gap between basic CRUD applications and production-grade distributed systems. This led to the inception of SimPesa, a high-fidelity payment gateway simulator. My initial goal: emulate...

Jan 167 min read

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Paul Murithi Kirera