Platform-minded engineer building tools.
What I do
I build lightweight infrastructure, developer tools, and practical systems for teams working with real-world constraints.
Selected work · 06
Speech recognition and synthesis for Shona and Ndebele, built in Zimbabwe on a consented, dialect-tagged corpus recorded by Zimbabwean speakers. Data Champion at the POTRAZ AI4I Challenge 2026.
A self-hosted mail engine in Python: SMTP in and out, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, a retrying outbound queue, and a REST API and CLI, with Dovecot serving the mailboxes. It runs the mail for this site.
CLI and npm library for .co.zw domain intelligence, DNS diagnostics, and email configuration checks. Useful for registry lookup workflows, provider detection, and troubleshooting domain setups.
Continuous deployment for VPS and bare-metal servers. Point it at a repository and it builds, starts, health-checks, and rolls back a release that doesn't come up healthy. No Docker, Kubernetes, or agents.
An Expo module that runs the real yt-dlp on an Android phone: a bundled, stripped-down Python runtime behind a typed JS API for info, formats, downloads, subtitles and playlists. No server.
A native Expo module that drives offscreen Android WebViews with a Playwright-like TypeScript API: navigation, locators, fills, taps, waits, screenshots, cookies and storage, inside the app itself. No desktop Chrome, ADB or Appium.
About
github.com/nigelbasa
Writing
Open to roles, internships and interesting problems