$ cd ~/about

Software Engineer · Johannesburg, South Africa

James Mapepa

Backend engineer, ten years in. Java and Spring Boot microservices for fintech and telecoms — the kind of systems that aren't allowed to fall over.Backend engineer, ten years in. Java and Spring Boot microservices for fintech and telecoms — the kind of systems that aren't allowed to fall over.

Reliability is a strange thing to fall in love with, but here we are. For ten years I've built Java and Spring Boot microservices on Kubernetes for companies where "the system is down" is a headline, and I've learned the careful, well-tested version of the job is almost always the right one. Go is my language for fun; React and TypeScript handle the frontends. These days what I care about most is the people side — mentoring junior developers and shaping engineering culture, because great software is built by great teams.