Product Lead · strategy and full stack · Optimizee Group

Here to stay is an architecture decision.

Three platforms, five markets, 450+ partners, and a product whose entire value is that the numbers on the page are right. You need one person who owns the roadmap and still opens the Laravel repo to ship the thing. That has been my day job for seven years.

Ndifon Desmond Yong, Malico to most people. Full-stack engineer, Douala, Cameroon. I'm at UTC+1, which is your CET, so there's no overlap to negotiate. Code at github.com/yondifon, history at malico.me/timeline.

Email me See how I read the product

The short version is in your application form. This is the long one, for whoever reads past the first minute.

Your list, my receipts

Point by point

No padding. Where I'm strong I say so; the two places I'm not are the last two rows.

5+ years full stack, in production
Since 2019, so seven. Backend first, and I ship the front of the screen too.
Your stack, already my stack
PHP and Laravel daily since 2019, server-rendered with Blade and Alpine, Tailwind for CSS, MySQL and Redis underneath. Published Laravel packages, and contributions to Prism, the Laravel interface for working with language models.
Architecture, and data accuracy
The part I'd worry about first. Your posting says data accuracy is critical, and it is: a stale fee is worse than an hour of downtime, because nobody sees it happen. My closest experience is a year at Psicología y Mente, a Spanish-language content platform, keeping it upright for 200,000 users and 25,000 professionals on code I did not write. Query plans, indexes, Redis caching, Cloudflare at the edge. Page two is mostly about the accuracy half.
Linux VPS, Nginx, GitHub Actions
I wrote docker-release, a Go tool for zero-downtime Docker Compose deploys, because I was tired of holding my breath during releases. Deployment is a thing I have code about, not just opinions.
AI integrations
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, all three in real use. I build my own tooling on top of them: Oga, a desktop app that runs several coding agents in parallel, and pluk, which gives an agent safe access to databases and services. Before that, fine-tuned models and prompts in production at FaithyApp, a devotionals app whose backend I built. Page three shows both tools.
Product ownership, and a portfolio you can open
SchoolFAQs, a study-materials service for students, from empty repository to running product. Since then my own studio, desgn.space, with paying clients, and Rondpoint, an AI assistant for small businesses, which sells a subscription. My products are at oga.desgn.space, pluk.desgn.space and rondpoint.ai; studio clients at jujumake.com and ndahi.net; source at github.com/yondifon.
Remote, async, and your hours
UTC+1 is CET, so my working day is your working day, all of it, and I'm nowhere near the United States. This page is the writing sample.
Leading and growing a team
Where I'm thinnest. I've led small teams, run subcontracts and hired for my own studio, but I have not built and managed a product department at your scale. I'd be learning that part with you watching. Better you hear it here than find it in month four.
Crypto, investing, personal finance
The honest version: I follow this as a builder, not as a trader. I've shipped payment integrations for African gateways and run subscription billing, and I read comparison content carefully before I buy anything. If you want someone with a trading record, that isn't me. If you want someone rigorous about the numbers a site publishes, that is.

Closest to your work

Four pieces of it

Owning a roadmap across three platforms means working from internal screens: what earns, what's stale, what shipped. That is where most of my work has been.

Ndahidesgn.space client · Laravel · ndahi.net

Ndahi runs the national e-learning platform for Cameroon's Ministry of Secondary Education. My studio handles the architecture side, and I want to be exact about the credit: I'm part of that team, not the whole of it.

  • Role-based access across ministry staff, inspectors and schools, each seeing a different slice of the same records.
  • A review and publication step, so a change is proposed and checked rather than typed straight into live data. A fee table needs the same discipline.
  • Correctness as the product, checked before publication rather than after a complaint.
Psicología y MenteBackend engineer · 2023 to 2024

A high-traffic Spanish-language content platform, 200,000 users and 25,000 professionals. Upgraded legacy code, automated the SEO pipeline, added an AI matching layer between readers and professionals, and pushed load off the origin with Redis and Cloudflare.

Content at scale, organic traffic as the business, performance as the constraint. It is the closest analogue I have to what you run.

DashboardsFaithyApp · AirGateway · Zudello

Billing, authentication and content automation at FaithyApp, plus the admin screens on top: subscription state, entitlements, and the views the team used to check them. Before that, three years of dense operator interfaces for AirGateway and Zudello on Upwork, across booking flows and document workflows.

Partner revenue, data freshness, page performance, ship queue. Four screens your team would open every morning, and page two is my sketch of them.

OgaMy own product · oga.desgn.space

A desktop app that gives a coding agent more hands: several tasks running in parallel across different tools and accounts, each on its own branch, each coming back as a diff I read.

I built it because I wanted more work in flight than one account allows, at a cost I control. More on page three.

Everything else

The rest of the track

Casual bit

A little about me

Ndifon Desmond Yong, though everyone calls me Malico. I live in Douala, Cameroon, and I've written software professionally since 2019, mostly backends, mostly the parts that have to keep working while nobody thinks about them.

I like inherited codebases. Most of my work has been on systems someone else built under pressure, making them smaller and steadier without breaking the people depending on them. Your line about not taking shortcuts is why I read the posting twice.

Outside client work I build my own tools: Oga and pluk for my own workflow, and Rondpoint to help small businesses find their footing in the AI age. I build with the fewest moving parts that fully do the job, then stop, which is why page two looks the way it does. The orange on this site is CryptoRunner's own, #f59100.