Emmanuel Titi
Summary
Full stack engineer and developer advocate in Nairobi with four years building Laravel, WordPress, Next.js and TypeScript products, and the communities around them. I grew from apprentice to Team Lead at LidoNation, now build and secure client Laravel and WordPress sites for a Toronto agency, and spent a year as developer advocate for IntersectMBO's Open Source Office. I publish open source tools, including PHP packages with about 17,000 installs and an MCP server for AI agents, and I use Claude Code daily with every change reviewed. I started out as a carpenter and still work like one: measure twice, build it to last, and leave notes for whoever comes next.
Core Skills
- Backend: PHP, Laravel (Horizon, Octane, Nova, Filament, Passport), Node.js, NestJS, REST APIs, BullMQ, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL
- Frontend and CMS: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Vue, Livewire, WordPress (Gutenberg blocks, WP-CLI, plugins, WooCommerce), HTML, CSS, SCSS, Figma Dev Mode
- Delivery: Git, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Laravel Forge, Pantheon, PHPUnit, Jest, Vitest, Playwright, Claude Code
- Developer relations: workshops, meetups, hackathons, technical writing, developer surveys, open source maintenance
Education & Certificates
- Cardano Blockchain Certified Associate (CBCA), Cardano Foundation, 2025
- DevOps, Moringa School, 2024; Data Science, Moringa School, 2022
Work History/Projects/Internships
Senior Software Developer at Brain Box Labs, RemoteJuly 2026 to Current
- Contract developer for a Toronto digital agency, building, fixing and securing client Laravel and WordPress sites under NDA.
- Closed all 8 findings from a third party penetration test on a Laravel app (team scoped access control, session invalidation, user enumeration, mass assignment), backed by 15+ new PHPUnit and browser tests, and cut a test environment slowdown that was adding about 35 percent to CI runs.
- Across 3 production sites, remediated 2 critical PHP remote code execution vulnerabilities (CVSS 9.2) by moving from end of life PHP 8.1 to 8.3, removed an SQL injection to code execution flaw (CVSS 8.8) with no downtime, and closed 10+ further audit findings.
- Turned Figma designs into Gutenberg blocks delivered through WP-CLI scripts, and fixed live front end bugs such as frozen asset versions and an SVG icon invisible on iOS Safari.
- Migrated a nonprofit site to Pantheon with zero downtime and a rollback path, then restored about 2,500 missing media files so 1,324 of 1,324 attachments served correctly, and redirected about 50 legacy URLs so old links kept working.
- Sole responder on a compromised production WordPress site: reconstructed a 5 week attack timeline, found 2 disguised webshells that scanners missed plus copies in 8+ directories, rebuilt from clean sources, and wrote the security checklist the team now uses on every site.
- Built a Brevo to WordPress campaign automation in Zapier, then restored it after a month long silent failure by tracing it to a misconfigured trigger filter.
Web Development Team Lead at LidoNation, RemoteNovember 2022 to June 2026
- Promoted from apprentice to Team Lead in under 2 years, leading a team of 4 on Laravel, Vue, React and NestJS platforms: sprint planning, tickets, pull request review and QA.
- Wrote most of the Laravel job classes for chain sync, NFT minting and reward payouts on lidonation.com (Laravel 12, Horizon, Octane), plus its REST API, with role based access control across the apps.
- Helped build the Learn to Earn platform in Laravel and Vue, which paid crypto and NFT rewards to 3,000+ learners who completed its courses.
- Carried out the port of catalystexplorer.com from Livewire to Vue, then led its port from Vue to React.
- Built the NestJS, TypeORM and BullMQ service behind 1694.io, a live governance platform, that syncs votes into Postgres as its own deployable so background work never slows the site, and was the largest contributor (112 of 327 commits) to a Next.js community platform client with Jest and Playwright tests.
- Built a Node.js service that syncs Salesforce data into Postgres through Kafka change data capture, with REST endpoints and Swagger docs.
- Wrote most of the GitLab CI pipeline for catalystexplorer.com and maintained Helm charts across a Kubernetes fleet, including a self hosted IPFS cluster.
Developer Advocate at IntersectMBO, RemoteSeptember 2025 to September 2026
- Developer advocate for Intersect's Open Source Office, keeping open source contributors and core maintainers in sync.
- Ran weekly developer working groups with 30+ regular attendees, supported developers daily across GitHub, Discord and forums, and sat on the technical committee of a $1M tooling sustainability program.
- Co organized a contribution hackathon that took local developers to their first merged contributions on 6 live open source repositories, including plutus and cardano-base.
- Co authored 3 quarterly Developer Experience reports (one of 4 authors), including analysis of a 55 response developer survey that turned community pain points into actions for maintainers.
- Wrote and co presented a two session web development workshop, built a CLI teaching tool, and landed an upstream fix on txpipe/oura (#914).
Co Director at Blockchain Centre NBO, NairobiMay 2025 to June 2026
- Co directed a Nairobi blockchain hub, growing a community of 100+ active developers through a monthly meetup that launched with 100+ attendees, weekly build sessions and a certification mentorship program.
Open Source and Developer Tools, Selected Work2023 to Current
- Published 3 PHP Composer packages for payments and NFT minting, with 17,000+ combined installs on Packagist, and a WooCommerce payment plugin with a React Gutenberg block released to WordPress.org through CI.
- Built Cardano MCP with Claude Code: a TypeScript MCP server with 39 tools across 6 modules, 61 tests and CI, plus 4 Claude Code plugins that make AI agents check their own output.
- Sole author of a blockchain indexer in Rust (Tokio, Postgres, resumable sync), and community maintainer on the Cardano Node Emulator with open pull requests.
Founder and Lead Engineer at MamaAI, RemoteMay 2026 to October 2026
- Built a maternal health assistant end to end on Laravel 13, Filament 5 and Inertia with React, with an AI agent layer, SMS through Africa's Talking and websockets through Reverb.
Junior Advisory Board Member (volunteer) at Ngong Road Children's Foundation, Nairobi2026 to Current
- Mentor young people on tech skills, job interviews and small business through the TechMates program, which I joined myself as a WordPress and PHP intern in 2022.