Who knew DevOps could be used in food industries in Africa? Certainly not me when I started in 2025. But looking back from 2029, it's wild how things turned out. I'm now running SafeFood Systems, a company that helps food manufacturers across Kenya track quality and compliance automatically. And on weekends? I consult for university teams competing in the A2RL autonomous racing league. Here's how DevOps made all of this possible.
When I started the DevOps Micro-Internship (DMI) by Pravin Mishra in early 2026, I honestly just wanted to learn CI/CD and land a tech job. But something clicked while building my first monitoring dashboard. I realized the same principles we use to keep software running could solve real problems in industries I actually cared about.
By 2027, I started playing around with an idea: what if we monitored food processing the way we monitor servers? I wrote a few LinkedIn posts about it, mostly to organize my thoughts. A small dairy company in Nairobi saw one of my posts and reached out for help with their quality control nightmares. I built them a basic system using Docker and Jenkins to automate their quality checks. The results were immediate—they cut their failures by 30% in four months.
That proof of concept became SafeFood Systems in 2028. By 2029, we had scaled to 6 clients across East Africa and 2 in Southern Africa. The platform monitors temperature, humidity, and contamination risks in real-time, then automatically generates compliance reports. I finally got to combine my DevOps skills with something that genuinely matters to people's health.
The motorsport consulting started by accident. I've always loved watching Formula 1 and endurance racing series. When I discovered A2RL in 2026, I noticed something familiar: their systems worked perfectly in testing but failed under race pressure. I did my bootcamp project on this problem and documented everything publicly. One team noticed my work and asked for help building proper CI/CD pipelines for their autonomous racing code. That team placed second in the 2027 season.
The craziest part? I'm not the smartest engineer. I just stayed consistent, built things people could see, and stopped waiting for someone to hand me opportunities. DevOps wasn't the end goal; it was the tool that let me work on problems I actually care about.
This is part of DevOps Micro-Internship (DMI) by Pravin Mishra.
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