available · cape town

Drew buildings.
Now I ship software instead.

Alan Kfull-stack engineerex-architect (the building kind)tea-fuelled tinkererSBK dancerreluctant runnerafrican-asian sensationprofessional googler

Making sturdy, friendly software in the Laravel and React corner of the internet.

get in touchpeek the lab
Alan K
2026portfolio · v3
about

Full-stack engineer. Specialty: web apps that survive contact with actual users.

Full-stack engineer with a soft spot for the Laravel ecosystem and a stubborn belief that frontend should feel quick. Most of my time is spent shipping internal tools, CRMs, and APIs that real teams rely on every day.

Outside the editor: trail walks when the head gets noisy, an ever-rotating reading list, and an unhealthy amount of opinions about tea.

  • based in
    cape town (joburg-grown)
  • stack
    laravel · react · typescript
  • now
    shipping at paramos
  • code review
    your favourite blocker
  • fuel
    rooibos, mostly
experience

Where I've been spending the hours.

4.9years shipping

  • Software Engineer

    @ PARAMOS

    Oct 2025 - present

    • Building a cloud field-service operating system with Laravel, Inertia and Tailwind
    • Wiring LLMs into the parts of operations work nobody enjoys doing by hand (onboarding, knowledge capture, summarisation)
    • Wearing whatever hat the sprint needs: feature work, infra, customer demos, the lot
    • Helping early customers go from chaos to coherent in less than a week, not six months of consulting
    • Laravel
    • PHP
    • Inertia
    • React
    • TypeScript
    • Tailwind
    • LLMs

  • Software Engineer

    @ Tripco

    2023 - Oct 2025

    • Built and maintained Laravel web apps that real teams relied on
    • Shipped responsive Vue / React frontends with a focus on snappy UX
    • Owned code review, planning, and pulling AI into day-to-day workflows
    • Deployed to GCP and tightened dev cycles where they hurt most
    • PHP
    • Laravel
    • React
    • Vue
    • MySQL
    • GCP
    • OpenAI

  • Junior Front End Engineer

    @ MOHARA

    2021 - 2023

    • Built custom CRM tools in React for a string of client teams
    • Pushed responsive layouts and interface quality up the priority list
    • Hunted page-weight regressions until the LCPs behaved
    • Owned bits of database design and the day-to-day maintenance
    • PHP
    • GCP
    • JavaScript
    • MySQL
    • HTML/CSS
toolkit

The tools I actually reach for.

Skills don't scale on a 1–100 bar. Here's what I'm comfortable shipping with, and what I keep on the bench for the right job.

interface

01
core
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind
  • Inertia
comfortable
  • Vue
  • Next.js
  • Motion
  • HTML/CSS
  • Radix UI

engine room

02
core
  • Laravel
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • LLMs
comfortable
  • REST APIs
  • Eloquent
  • Queues
  • Claude
  • Gemini
  • OpenAI
  • SQLite

around the edges

03
core
  • Git
  • GCP
comfortable
  • Docker
  • CI/CD
  • Bun
  • Vercel
lab

Small things, made for the joy of it.

No client work here. Just little experiments (canvas, keys, grids) where the goal is to learn, not to ship.

visitors

Built in public, read in public.

Every page load gets a coarse browser tag and a country code from the edge headers, then aggregated in Upstash Redis. No IPs, no fingerprints, no cookies. Identity is a random localStorage id.

you
checking you in…
no cookies. no ip stored.identity is a 22-char random string in your localStorage.
visitors
–
unique, lifetime
visits
–
per visitor-day
countries
–
distinct iso codes
top browser
–
by first-visit-of-day
returning
–
of all visits
here now
–
60s presence window
recent drop-ins
quiet so far. you might be the first today.

upstash redis · edge runtime · polling every 30s

contact

Got a problem worth solving?
Let's have a chat.

I'm open to interesting work, whether full-time, contract, or just an early-stage idea you want to think out loud about. No pitch deck required.

say hisee the github