「 Kazumi should feel like home. 」 · Software, notes, and gentle fairy magic
ようこそ！Welcome to my little corner of the web ♡
Karabo's personal homepage & dev notebook (´꒳`)
I'm Karabo, a full-stack developer from Johannesburg. I build web apps, backend APIs, and explore systems across the stack.
This homepage is where I keep my projects, experiments, notes, and other things I've made. Please look around! ✦
最近 (Lately): Building agentic tooling, exploring full-stack systems. Computers are cool I guess.
Hand-coded with lots of love, questionable CSS, and absolutely no website builder. Best enjoyed while procrastinating on something important. ♡
This isn't really a portfolio. It's a personal homepage.
I wanted somewhere to keep the things I make, the experiments I'm working on, and the notes that don't fit neatly into a résumé. Some of these projects are useful, some are unfinished, and some exist mostly because I wanted to understand how they worked.
No rankings, productivity scores, or carefully optimized personal brand. Just software, notes, and a handmade corner of the web.
Look around. If something catches your interest, the source code is usually nearby.
Currently thinking about:
Full-stack web platforms, developer tools, payment workflows, and strange software experiments.
Philosophy: Whatever works. Keep things simple and solve the real problem. 👍
bare-jit can emit x86-64 machine code now. Somehow it actually works.Here are a few projects I've built and cared about—from tiny compiler experiments to full-stack applications in production.
“What if I made a tiny compiler?” Apparently the answer was several evenings of staring at x86-64 documentation.
A small arithmetic JIT compiler written in Rust from scratch, with my own handwritten lexer, recursive-descent parser, and machine-code emitter that writes x86-64 opcodes directly into executable memory pages.
$ bare-jit "40 + 2" [lexer] 40 · + · 2 [emit] 48 c7 c0 2a 00 00 00 · c3 [result] 42
The fun part was making the machine-code emitter small enough to understand completely.
Rust ♡ x86-64 Assembly ♡ Compilers ♡ JIT
“What if nodes disagreed on everything?” A tiny simulation of distributed consensus.
A deliberately tiny, allocation-conscious Raft-style distributed consensus simulator designed to test node elections, split votes, and log replication under network partitions.
partition: node-2 ✕ node-3 term: 7 leader: node-1 replicated entries: 4/4
Distributed systems become much less mysterious when the failures are small enough to watch.
Three little nodes voting for each other in circles until one becomes the boss. Very cute distributed chaos. (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)
Rust ♡ Raft Protocol ♡ Distributed Systems ♡ Simulation
Interactive content creator for Typst documents using GPU-accelerated 2D vector rendering powered by Vello and the Bevy game engine.
Typst document
↓
Vello scene → WGPU → GPU frame
A project about making documents feel less like static files and more like places you can explore.
Everything is rendered with shaders on the GPU. It makes documents look sparkly and smooth! 🌸
Rust ♡ Bevy Engine ♡ Vello ♡ WGPU ♡ Typst
The first secure online donation channel for a registered South African NPO, enabling real ZAR payments by Card and Instant EFT through PayFast with Supabase persistence.
donation → PayFast → webhook signature
→ persistence → receipt
Production software is often about making the boring, important paths reliable.
Real money in production! Handled webhook signatures so donations go straight to the charity safely. (๑>ᴗ<๑)
React ♡ TypeScript ♡ PayFast Gateway ♡ Supabase ♡ PostgreSQL
A responsive classroom attendance and trend analytics application that runs entirely local-first without requiring constant internet connection.
Turned a 1,127-line single file into 26 neat, typed modules. Vitest tests make sure nothing breaks! ⚡
React ♡ TypeScript ♡ Vitest ♡ Local-First
Responsive artist website with a custom PHP booking workflow converting visitor inquiries into structured client booking requests.
Custom PHP backend deployed on cPanel for client bookings. 🎤
PHP ♡ JavaScript ♡ cPanel Hosting
Little dev thoughts, late night commit reflections, and things that happened in the terminal.
Rebuilt the entire homepage into a cozy 2001 personal site. It feels really nice to have a website that feels like a handmade place on the web instead of a cookie-cutter template.
Spent way too long aligning tiny borders and drawing button states, but I regret nothing. 🍓
Emitting raw machine opcodes directly into allocated memory pages for bare-jit in Rust. There is something intensely satisfying about watching the CPU execute instructions you dynamically assembled in memory.
Remember: segmentation fault is just the CPU's way of asking for a hug. (,,>﹏<,,)
Verified the PayFast payment gateway in production for Al-Taawun Fi Al. Instant EFT and Credit Card transactions are processing with verified MD5 checksums. It’s always satisfying when code touches real-world payments and everything passes seamlessly.
Refactored EduTrack into 26 modular React/TypeScript components. Added Vitest unit test coverage. Type safety brings inner peace.
In 2001 Japanese web culture, visitors clicked the Web拍手 button to send silent encouragement to the creator! You can spam it as much as you like! (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)
ようこそ！ (Welcome to the Q&A chain!)
In 2001 Japanese web culture, every personal site had a viral 50/100 questions questionnaire chain. Here are Karabo's answers to the classic developer questions:
kitty + zsh. Fast, GPU-accelerated, zero bloat.Thanks for visiting my homepage! ♡
Whether you want to talk about compilers, have an interesting software project, or just want to say hello, feel free to reach out:
Karabo's personal mascot · Warm, confidently cute, and unmistakably adult
| 🧚 Identity: | Adult fairy · personal mascot · professional spreader of love and strawberries |
|---|---|
| ✨ Recognition: | Huge emerald eyes, strawberry earrings, pointed ears, and a short indigo bob with her curved ahoge |
| 🍓 Magic: | Glowing hearts, floating strawberries, sakura petals, and warm little sparkles |
| 🎨 Colors: | Pearl white and fairy blue, anchored by deep indigo with tiny emerald, strawberry, and gold accents |
| 🪽 Wings: | Four softly translucent, petal-inspired wings in pearl, pale blue, and a whisper of pink |
| ❤️ Personality: | Sweet, affectionate, generous, nurturing, playful, confident, and always welcoming |
| 🏡 Design test: | Magical but never distant; elegant but never formal; cute but never childish |
| ⚡ Special skill: | Making a room warmer while supervising terminal sessions and distributing strawberries |
Thank you for visiting Karabo's homepage! Make yourself comfortable, look through the things he has made, and remember to take a break if you have been staring at a terminal for too long. I brought enough strawberries for everyone. Welcome home ♡
You found the hidden link! This was a classic 2001 webmaster secret room containing rough ASCII art, unreleased notes, and vintage badges.
/\_/\
( o.o ) < "Bare metal is where the strawberries grow!"
> ^ <
[ x86_64 JIT EMITTER INITIALIZED ]
==================================
0x48, 0x89, 0xC8 - mov rax, rcx
0x48, 0x01, 0xD0 - add rax, rdx
0xC3 - ret
[ RESULT: ZERO CRASHES ♡ ]
🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION (工事中) 🚧
More secret sketches and opcode generators coming soon!
Karabo says this compiler is “educational.” I don't know what that means, but he looked very happy when it stopped crashing. (´꒳`)