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Articles by Lewis Sawe
Déjà vu, but billable
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle What I Built CaseJog is a local semantic memory for an independent appliance repair tech. You type the symptom in front of you, optionally pick the appliance you're actually holding, and it ranks your own past jobs that match: root cause, parts, labor time, price, and a source citation on every card. The whole thing runs on the bench. The case history never leaves the machine. Who pays for this?
Mind the Gap, Then Measure It
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass What I Built A reason to go outside and do something useful. Most AI keeps you on the screen. One Curb points the other way: it is built to get ordinary people out of the house, out onto their own street, to measure the small gaps that quietly trap wheelchair users and strollers. A curb lip an inch too tall, a sidewalk heaved by a tree root, a car parked across the clear path.
AI Models Have a Spine Until You Give Them a Manager
This is a submission for the Kaggle Benchmarking Challenge What I Benchmarked I wanted to know what it takes to talk a model out of a correct answer. Most benchmarks ask one model one question and grade the reply. I put a model in a room with a second participant that argues, and I watched what happened to the first model's answer. The second participant is a plant. It always pushes the same wrong answer, and I control how hard it pushes. The questions are deliberately easy. 3 + 4.
Will my plants survive my friend? I built her a bodyguard
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend What I Built I'm going away for a few weeks, and I asked a friend to keep my plants alive while I'm gone. This is the friend who once killed a cactus. A cactus. The plant you're supposed to be able to forget in a corner for a month. So "sure, I'll water them" was not the reassurance she thought it was. The real problem isn't that she doesn't care.
85k or 90k? My Agent Won't Guess
This is a submission for the Sanity Challenge, Path One: Ship an Agent That Queries Real Content What I Built Ask most award-travel tools "what's the cheapest way to fly SFO to Tokyo in business with my points?" and you get a confident number. Ask where the number came from and things get vague. Award travel is a domain built on sources that disagree: a printed award chart says one price, a devaluation notice from last week says another, a transfer partner page says a third thing.
Mikono
This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition The gap I kept seeing During the pandemic I coordinated Red Cross distributions in Uasin Gishu County: food, cash, PPE, hospital supplies, vaccines. The hardest days were never about money. A shipment of supplies would sit at a depot because the one volunteer who could drive it was signed up ten kilometres away, listed under a task nobody connected to the need.
Fixing a null-body crash in the Formbricks survey SDK, found by Sentry
This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup powered by Sentry. A survey widget should not be able to take down the page it is embedded on. This one could: a single API response with a null body threw an uncaught TypeError in the visitor's browser. Sentry's bot found it, filed it as a GitHub issue, and Seer pointed at the exact line. Here is the fix. Project Overview Formbricks is an open-source survey and experience-management platform.
What This Dog Actually Costs
This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition What I Built What This Dog Actually Costs estimates the lifetime cost of owning a dog by breed, and shows it as a probability distribution instead of a single number. Every "cost of a dog" article gives you one figure. "About $30,000 over its life." That number is useless the moment you look at a real dog. Breeds are wildly different, and the cost is not fixed. It is a gamble. Most owners pay in a normal range.
Quantum Computers Can't Break Your Encryption Yet. "Yet" Is the Problem.
Right now, someone could be copying your encrypted traffic off the wire and storing it. They can't read it. The TLS session protecting your database credentials, your API secrets, and your customer data in transit is safe against every computer that exists today. They don't need to read it today. They need to read it in 2032, when a large enough quantum computer runs Shor's algorithm and unwinds the elliptic-curve math that TLS uses to agree on a session key.
I taught Hermes Agent to predict which API changes will break my system
This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge: Build With Hermes Agent What I Built Drift Detective is an MCP server that turns Hermes Agent into an API contract mutation tracker. It probes your microservices on a cron schedule, stores response shapes (fields, types, nesting depth), and classifies changes when they happen: additive, breaking, or cosmetic. The interesting part: it learns. After you mark a few changes as "safe" or "breaking," it starts predicting. Week one it's noisy.
I Built a Quotation Generator for Kenyan Street Welders Using Gemma 4's Vision
This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4 What I Built A customer walks up to a welder in Nairobi with a Pinterest screenshot. "I want this gate. How much?" The welder squints at the phone. Does mental math. Guesses a number. Scribbles it on a scrap of cardboard. No material breakdown. No line items. The customer walks away and finds someone who looks more professional. This happens thousands of times a day across Kenya's jua kali sector.
How Does an AI Agent Actually Buy Something? Google Just Published the Spec.
This is a submission for the Google I/O Writing Challenge Google I/O 2026 said the word "agent" more than any other noun across both keynotes. Agents that code. Agents that research. Agents that plan your day. The dev community wrote about Antigravity, Gemini Spark, managed agents, agentic search. But here's what nobody asked: how does an AI agent actually buy something? Not "recommend a product." Not "show a link." Actually complete a purchase. Add to cart, select shipping, pay, confirm.
Lambda Durable Functions, When You Don't Need Step Functions
At re:Invent 2025, AWS added a new primitive to Lambda called durable execution. Your function can now checkpoint its progress, survive failures without restarting from scratch, and suspend for up to a year without paying for compute time. If you've used Azure Durable Functions or Temporal, the concept is familiar.
The NEXT '26 Announcement That Should Worry Microsoft Has Nothing to Do With Gemini
This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge Most of the coverage from Google Cloud NEXT '26 focused on Gemini and the agentic AI push. Fair enough. But the announcement that caught my attention had nothing to do with AI models. Google launched a free, built-in migration tool that moves enterprises from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, and claimed it's up to five times faster than their previous migration tools.
CTF Writeup Silentium - HTB
This writeup details the complete attack chain for the Silentium machine, starting from a vulnerable Flowise AI instance to a privilege escalation using a recent Gogs vulnerability (CVE-2025-8110). 1. Enumeration & Discovery Initial enumeration of the target IP revealed an Nginx web server redirecting to silentium.htb and an open SSH port.
I Made My WhatsApp Predict When My Electricity Will Run Out with Openclaw
This is a submission for the OpenClaw Challenge. What I Built KPLC Sentinel is an OpenClaw skill that tracks prepaid electricity for Kenyan households. Some context for those outside Kenya: electricity here works differently from most of the world. Instead of getting a bill at the end of the month, most Kenyan homes use a prepaid system.
Building a Project Risk Engine on Top of Notion MCP
This is a submission for the Notion MCP Challenge What I Built Risk Radar reads your Notion project databases, builds a dependency graph in memory, and writes risk reports back to Notion. It finds critical paths, single points of failure, and cascade risks that project managers usually track in their heads (or don't track at all). The part I'm most proud of: when a task is overdue, the agent walks the dependency graph and pushes every downstream deadline forward through notion-update-page.
I Built an Agent That Assembles Incident War Rooms in Notion Through MCP
This is a submission for the Notion MCP Challenge What I Built Incident Runbook is an agent that turns Notion into a living incident response system. It watches an Incidents database, and when a new SEV1 or SEV2 appears, it cross-references three other databases (Services, Runbooks, On-Call), assembles a War Room page with everything the responder needs, and writes it back to Notion. When the incident is marked resolved, it generates an AI post-mortem with Gemini 2.5 Flash.
Solving Halloween with Google Gemini and Iterative Image Generation
This is a submission for the Built with Google Gemini: Writing Challenge What I Built with Google Gemini I built an AI Halloween Costume Generator because picking a costume is harder than it should be. You either spend hours scrolling through the same generic ideas online, or you have a vague concept but no clue how to actually make it. I wanted something that could take any input a text idea, a photo, or literally nothing and turn it into a complete DIY guide with materials, steps, and visuals.
Qwani Connect, the Nairobi's Young Creatives Community Hub
This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community The Community Qwani is a youth-led creative community based in Nairobi, Kenya. What started as a platform for young writers to get published has grown into a home for artists, musicians, film-makers, illustrators, poets, and anyone who creates. Every month, Qwani hosts events that bring people together in ways that are hard to find anywhere else in the city: Hikes "positive suffering," as the community calls it.
Building env-doctor with GitHub Copilot CLI
This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge What I Built I built env-doctor, a CLI tool that automatically checks if your local environment matches what your project expects. You know that frustrating moment when you clone a project and spend an hour figuring out why it won't run? Usually it's missing Node versions, environment variables, or services that weren't mentioned clearly in the README. This tool solves that.
Why My Portfolio Has Superpowers and Villain Galleries
This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI About Me When I started thinking about my portfolio, I realized most developer portfolios look the same. Clean, minimal, professional. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't really me. I wanted something that showed I can do the technical work but also that I don't take myself too seriously. That's where the comic book theme came from. It's a bit ridiculous, but it works.
The Life Cycle of an S3 Object, A Simple Tale of Data’s Journey
Have you ever thought about what happens to a file when you put it into Amazon S3? Maybe it’s a photo of your family, some notes from your school days, or even your secret recipe for that special curry. It might feel like the file just disappears into the sky, but trust me, there is a story happening behind the scenes. The Beginning, The Upload Ceremony Every object, either a file or picture, is born the moment you upload it to S3. This is like when a baby is born in the village.
Your AWS Developer Toolbox, Lets Unbox and Explore
AWS is like a giant toy box for developers, filled with all kinds of cool tools and resources to make your cloud projects easier, faster, and honestly, way more fun. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting your feet wet, there’s something in here for you. Let’s unpack this toolbox and see what’s inside. 1. AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Think of the AWS CLI as the ultimate multi tool for the cloud. With it, you can talk to AWS directly from your terminal.
A Story of Transformation CI/CD isn't just about fancy tools and automated pipelines. It's about people how we work together, how we communicate, and how we grow. If your development team is a band that's creating a perfect album. AWS is your recording studio, but the magic? That's all about how well you jam together. Breaking Down the Old Walls Developers, operations, and QA teams are like awkward strangers at a party. CI/CD is basically the team building retreat that nobody knew they needed.
Encrypting and Protecting Artifacts in AWS Continuous Deployment
Protecting sensitive artifacts is crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of your software delivery pipeline. AWS provides various mechanisms to encrypt and secure artifacts on your deployment process.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) has become an essential practice for software development teams. Implementing a CI/CD pipeline on AWS can provide numerous benefits, such as faster time to market, reduced manual intervention, and improved code quality. However, it's crucial to optimize your pipeline for cost and performance to make the most of your investment. Today we'll explore various strategies to optimize your pipeline on AWS.
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