Byron Mandela
This is my corner. I'm a full-stack developer who turns half-baked ideas into working products: usually fueled by lots of music and a love for solving problems. I work with startups and entrepreneurs who need someone to just... build the thing.
Selected Work
A few products I have helped shape, build, launch, or improve in production
DocQA
Built for researchers, students and professionals who need quick insights from their PDF using AI.
DocQA is a SaaS application that lets users upload PDFs and have contextual, citation-aware conversations with them. It supports multi-document scoping with relevance-score filtering, so answers stay grounded even across large document sets.
Visit DocQA
WARE Solar
Shopify store optimization
I developed custom Shopify apps to synchronize product data, inventory, and prices between the supplier and Shopify in real-time. This increased conversion rates, tripled sales within 3 months, and grew monthly visits to over 25k, achieving a 6.4 ROAS in Q4 2024.
Visit WARE Solar
Privacy Scoring
Web crawling to score sites privacy policies.
Built a web crawler for Neutronian, a data privacy research firm, to scan over 10,000 domains and detect the presence and accessibility of privacy policies, terms of service, and cookie notices. Scoring each site on transparency and organization of its privacy practices.
Visit Privacy Scoring
Peach Cars
Solving data scarcity, one scrape at a time.
Peach Cars, a Kenyan car marketplace, had an in-house ML model to estimate prices for used and new cars. It suffered from data scarcity, making predictions unreliable. I built a scheduled web scraper across three classifieds sites to continuously feed fresh listing data into their model over 3 months. The result was improved prediction accuracy.
Visit Peach Cars
Writing
More writingSome recent thoughts on engineering, models, and building things.