~/$ whoami
Sipho Omotola Mahlangu
I design event-driven backends and AI-native systems, and I keep them boring in production.
//Now
~/$ cat now.md# 2026-08
- $building BYO Pulse, a city-parameterised civic platform. Bulawayo is live; the next city is warming up. byopulse.com ↗
- $growing uVelaphi, the Digital Ancestor: 1,100+ customs, names, dishes, and garments, and counting. uvelaphi.com ↗
- $shipping design-led sites and storefronts for clients, end to end: architecture, build, deploy.
- $exploring agentic systems that earn trust: grounded answers, eval gates in CI, humans in the loop.
- $open-to contract work, collaborations, and interesting problems. get in touch →
//Skills
$ Backend & Systems
$ AI Engineering
$ Cloud & Infrastructure
$ Data & Storage
$ Frontend
//Projects
BYO Pulse
byopulse.com →
Bulawayo’s civic utility: official city information, aggregated so a resident can answer Where do I go? Who do I call? How do I do this? What’s happening nearby? Fast on any phone, without an account: 800+ mapped places, council notices, events, and per-suburb pages.
- Grounded agent: Ask Byo answers only from the site’s own sourced corpus. Out-of-corpus questions get a refusal that routes back to search, never a guess; answers are link-free by design, with sources rendered as verifiable chips.
- Curated pipeline: Daily scrapers open refresh PRs, LLM enrichment passes machine gates and golden-case evals in CI, community submissions wait for human moderation, and every surface shows its source and checked date.
uVelaphi
uvelaphi.com →
The Digital Ancestor: the customs of a continent, recorded for a generation raised between worlds. 1,100+ entries across customs, names, dishes, and garments answer what to do, when, with whom, and above all why.
- Labelled by trust: Every entry shows how far it has been verified, from an AI-aggregated first draft, to community-affirmed, to elder-verified. A machine draft never poses as settled knowledge, and the conversational Ask the Elder ships as a clearly marked preview.
- Built for the diaspora: Multiple countries and peoples are the point, not the exception. A guided path narrows a continent of customs down to your moment, and a Name Decoder reads what any African name carries.
Client builds
Design-led marketing sites and storefronts for studios, boutiques, and clinics, delivered end to end: architecture, build, and deploy. Private repositories, public live sites.
- carinapereira.com beauty academy
- lukhanyomdingi.co.za fashion e-commerce
- miraclefertility.de fertility care
- watchdogmedia.co.za film production
//Areas of Interest
AI Engineering & Agentic Systems
Building AI-native software: agentic workflows, retrieval and knowledge graphs, and LLMs wired into real backend systems — with explainability and human oversight designed in from the start.
Distributed Systems & Real-Time Data
Event-driven architectures, streaming pipelines, and the operational discipline that keeps high-throughput systems reliable at scale.
Personal Curiosities
Web3 and decentralised infrastructure, applied statistics, and local-first AI — explored off the clock, occasionally escaping into side projects.
//Contact
Building something that needs a solid backend, or an AI feature that has to behave in production? Tell me about it. Contract work, collaborations, and interesting problems all welcome.