Mbugua Karanja

I’m a pragmatic, detail-oriented full-stack developer with 5+ years designing scalable, maintainable, and performance-optimized web applications. I specialize in PHP (Laravel), modular architectures, and real-time API integrations—so systems stay reliable, extensible, and future-proof.

As a PHP/Laravel Developer (Freelance), I engineer subscription-like microservices and expand follow.it with new modules (Trademark, GitHub, Crypto, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Backlink feeds). I build and maintain robust real-time feed systems using REST API integrations (GitHub REST, USPTO, LinkedIn, Bluesky), and I improve performance and scalability with encapsulated preprocessing pipelines and clean persistence strategies.

At Uncapped Agency, I build and maintain full-stack web apps with Laravel, Livewire, AlpineJS, TailwindCSS, and MariaDB. I’ve migrated UIs from Bootstrap to TailwindCSS, modernized templating for faster, more dynamic email campaigns using a Handlebars-backed approach, and engineered job-queue systems for large dataset processing—improving memory efficiency with generators, pagination, and async support.

Across projects, I’ve consistently focused on measurable outcomes—like enhancing an importing endpoint to handle 10,000+ contacts with a 20% performance boost and <2% failure rate, porting Livewire datatables to FilamentPHP for cleaner maintainability, and delivering UI/UX refreshes with optimized dark/light modes. I also bring an early foundation from IT internships, where I supported deployments, security audits, and learning platform operations.