I'm a design engineer and product builder from Ghana, currently based in London. I build things end to end, usually the design and the engineering both, across whatever I happen to be interested in at the time.
Most things I build are in private repositories, so this profile is a lot emptier than what I actually work on in practice. Here's a rough breakdown of what's in those repositories.
CediRates. I'm the founding engineer and design lead at CediRates, Ghana's primary financial data platform. Most things are aggregation oriented; banks and forex bureaus publish exchange and fuel prices in their own format, on their own schedule, and sometimes disagree with each other, so a lot of the work is getting that into a format that can be easily compared without having to think about the differences. I built the currency converter, company pages, news feed, admin panel, and wrote the script that automatically publishes the daily rate tables so no one has to do it by hand. It has about 50,000 monthly active users, and peaked at over 3 million concurrently when the cedi depreciated heavily.
ChaleCheck. A social gaming and events platform, which runs near-weekly game nights for about 200 people, where the app handles the signups, payments, and game logic for the event. I built the first version, and did a complete redesign after it became clear it wasn't working as a single product, as the app, the game, and the daily event were essentially three separate things that only loosely fit together. The redesign pulled everything into four tabs.
Client work. I've been freelancing since 2016, working for a variety of NGOs, travel agencies, hotels, shipping companies, and consultancies, usually building infrastructure, tools, web and mobile apps, and training the engineers who will be maintaining them afterwards.
TypeScript and React for products, Python for research. Once something works, most of my time goes into how it feels, which usually turns into systems thinking, since how a product feels is mostly about how well the parts fit together rather than any single screen. The other half of it is context, meaning what using something is actually like in the situation it gets used in. A rate table gets checked in a hurry on a phone with bad signal, and a game night app gets used in a loud room with 200 people waiting on it. I'll happily spend hours on look and feel.
Case studies and writing at antwi.dev · [email protected]