Platform · railsLive
Softserve Payments
The mobile-money and card rails underneath everything — M-Pesa, EcoCash and more behind one accept-then-callback API, live in production.
.NETMobile money
// founder · engineer · builder
I build the systems that move money and people.
I'm Joel Makara. From Maseru, I design and ship digital infrastructure — payments and comms rails, and the consumer products that ride on them — for Lesotho and the wider continent. Design system to live system, end to end.
PaymentsCommsMobilePlatformsAzure.NETNext.jsFlutter
Live
Payments in production
10+
Products & ventures
3
Environments per platform
1
Builder, end to end
// selected work
Systems I've built, and the products on top of them.
Most of these share rails — one payments core, one comms layer — so a new product is weeks, not years.
Platform · messagingBuilding
Softserve Comms
Email, SMS and WhatsApp as one multi-tenant service with client isolation and FX-aware billing — the notification layer every product leans on.
AzureMulti-tenant
Consumer · mobilityBuilding
Leeto
Ride-hailing built for how Lesotho actually navigates — pins and landmarks over street addresses. Flutter, Mapbox, on the Payments + Comms rails.
FlutterMapbox
Consumer · fintechScaling
Tsetela
Retail investing for Basotho — start from M100. A full design system and four surfaces live across dev, sandbox and prod.
ReactCIS
Platform · eventsBuilding
Softserve Tickets
Event ticketing with cashless RFID — .NET API, Flutter scanner app, organiser portal, all wired to Payments and Comms.
.NETRFID
Consumer · ventureBuilding
Occasio
Beautiful invitation microsites on multi-tenant rails — Next.js front of house, .NET and Azure SQL behind.
Next.jsMulti-tenant
// how I work
A repeatable way to take an idea all the way to production.
01
Design system first
Every build starts with tokens, type and components. Get the system right and the screens design themselves — and stay consistent across surfaces.
02
Site, then platform
Ship the front of house, then the engine behind it. Marketing, app, portal and API move together so a product is whole, not half.
03
Rails over rewrites
Payments and comms are built once and reused. New ventures borrow the rails instead of rebuilding them — speed compounds.
04
GitOps to live
Feature to develop to main, environments by branch. No manual deploys — dev, sandbox and prod stay honest and reproducible.
// about
An engineer with a founder's hands.
I started Softserve to build the financial and digital infrastructure Lesotho was missing — not slide decks, working systems. Today that means a payments platform settling real money, a comms layer wiring up notifications, and a growing shelf of consumer products built on the same foundations.
I work the full stack of a company: the design system and the database schema, the Flutter screen and the Azure pipeline, the brand and the bank integration. I like the part where an idea becomes something you can actually log into.
Rooted in Maseru, building for the continent — and unembarrassed about doing it from here.
I work across
- Product & brand — design systems, UX, identity
- Frontend — Next.js, React, Flutter
- Backend — .NET, APIs, multi-tenant platforms
- Cloud — Azure, Static Web Apps, GitOps
- Fintech — payments rails, mobile money, CIAM
“Build it once, build it as a system, and let the next thing borrow the rails.”
// get in touch
Building something that needs to move money or people?
I take on a small number of ventures and partnerships where I can build the whole thing properly. If that's you, let's talk.
Maseru, Lesotho · available for select work