/ FEATURED ESSAY
Why every East African SaaS should ship CMS-first, not CMS-eventually.
By Daniel Mwaura, Lead Web Architect·March 14, 2026·8 min
Why every East African SaaS should ship CMS-first, not CMS-eventually.
We learned this on three consecutive engagements: when an editorial team cannot publish without an engineer, the entire product loses operational momentum. The CMS-first architecture we now adopt by default — the trade-offs, the failure modes and the precise stack choices behind it.
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Engineering·Feb 5·4 min
Our 12-package starter for every new Next.js engagement at Hanova.
The exact dependency list we add to every greenfield project, the rationale behind each choice and the libraries we deliberately keep out of every stack — and why.
Search·Feb 12·6 min
GEO is not SEO: how generative engines actually decide what to cite.
Eighteen months of measured experiments across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — what triggers a brand citation, what gets paraphrased away, and how to structure content so the LLMs name you.
Operations·Feb 19·7 min
Fixed-scope, fixed-budget: the contract template we have used on 30+ engagements.
Hourly invoicing creates misaligned incentives for client and vendor alike. The contract architecture we use instead — what we sign, how we re-scope, and the language that prevents disputes.
Design·Feb 24·5 min
Designing for Swahili: type, line-length and the end of placeholder labels.
Three small interface decisions made one of our authentication forms 18% easier to complete for non-English-first users. The research that justified them and the rules we now keep.
Data·Mar 2·9 min
Self-hosted analytics: the Plausible and Umami architecture we ship by default.
Why we stopped recommending Google Analytics in 2024, the two-hour migration we now standardise on, and the privacy posture it gives every client by default.
Engineering·Mar 9·6 min
What M-PESA taught us about API design that Stripe never could.
Feature-phone constraints forced Kenya's most successful API into a shape Silicon Valley still hasn't reproduced — a study in operational pragmatism over architectural elegance.
