Osman Ali

Backend engineer. I build and operate systems where reliability matters.

Lead engineer at TapnHop, transit payments.
Creator of UniPlan, serving 20k+ students. Backend-first, but I ship frontend too.

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How I think about backend systems

Simple beats clever.

A boring system you can debug at 2am beats an elegant abstraction nobody understands.

Own the full lifecycle.

Design, build, ship, operate. If I wrote it, I’m on call for it.

Data shape drives the design.

Before I touch a framework, I model the data and the flows. Most backend problems are data problems.

In production

Building the systems behind Ghana’s digital transit payments.

Lead backend engineer for a transit fare collection platform.

I own core backend services across trips, users, and payments. Built for real money, in production.

Python
Microservices
PostgreSQL
Distributed systems

I built UniPlan to make university choices easier

Founded and operate UniPlan, helping students navigate admissions. 20k+ users served.

I own backend, data, frontend, and operations end-to-end.

Python
PostgreSQL
Data engineering

On the side

Veil is a secrets management CLI in Go. It encrypts, decrypts, and rotates secrets with a clean terminal UX.

KNUST Research. I designed a genetic algorithm to automate university exam timetable generation, 2023.

Outside of code: football, music, and probably overthinking some distributed system problem at 2am.

Notes

Things I’m working through on distributed systems, data, and tooling. How software behaves in production. First entries incoming.

Why idempotency is every backend engineer’s problem

Coming soon

Reconciliation when the network lies to you

Coming soon

Designing a rule engine that produces correct answers

Coming soon

Let’s build something.

I enjoy working on systems where reliability, correctness, and maintainability matter. I’m always interested in meeting thoughtful people and teams building useful things. In any domain.

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