About
Evanrobby
Macharia.
A frontend developer in Nairobi, four years into building React products - Next.js, TanStack Start and Astro - for people who need them to actually work.
I came into the work through an IT degree and a software development certificate, then learned the rest the way most of us do - shipping, breaking things, and rebuilding them better the second time.
The longer story
I started freelancing in 2022, mostly taking designs from agencies and turning them into production frontends. That meant a lot of first-time problems solved in public: a dealership catalogue with thousands of listings, a voting site that had to survive a launch-night spike, a contribution platform handling real money.
An internship at Mjengo Smart Technology taught me the part freelancing does not - working inside someone else's codebase, matching their conventions, and leaving it faster than I found it.
The stack has moved with me: Next.js first, TanStack Start for newer apps, Astro whenever a site should be mostly HTML. Outside client work I am learning React Native, writing up what I get wrong, and slowly getting better at motion. I read more documentation than is strictly healthy.
How I work
I join while things are still moving and ask the awkward questions early - empty states, error copy, what happens on a slow connection. It is cheaper than finding out in QA.
Loading, empty, error, too-much-data. Get those right and the happy path takes care of itself. Most of what makes an interface feel solid is invisible when everything works.
Readable components, typed props, and a structure the next developer can follow without a handover call. I would rather write slightly more code than something clever.
Experience
Frontend for a Nairobi digital growth partner that builds brands, products and platforms — taking designs from the file to production for its clients and its own site, in whatever stack the project calls for, and staying on for the releases after launch.
Part of the engineering team on a retained basis: I look after a set of live systems — bug fixes, new features and updates as they’re needed — and pick up the frontend build when a new project comes in.
Building responsive React applications - Next.js and, more recently, TanStack Start - for clients across automotive, education and non-profit work, with Astro for content-led sites. Usually from the design file through to launch, and often staying on for the second release.
Worked on dynamic web applications in React, Next.js and Tailwind, and spent the internship tightening performance and code standards across the product.
Toolkit
Want the short version on paper?
The résumé covers the same ground in one page.