About

About me

Who Amir Aman is: a software engineer in Ethiopia and the founder of Driftwatch, building web platforms, Android apps, AI tooling and backends.

Updated

I’m Amir Aman, a software engineer based in Ethiopia and the founder of Driftwatch, a breaking-change radar for the third-party APIs a team depends on. Alongside it I work independently, building web platforms, Android apps and backends for clients and for my own products.

What I build

  • Web platforms in TypeScript with Next.js and React, from event and ticketing systems to real-time collaborative editors.
  • Android apps with React Native and Expo that work offline and keep data on the phone, such as Hours & Pay and Quadrille.
  • Backends and infrastructure in Node.js, Python (FastAPI) and Go, with PostgreSQL as the source of truth and often as the queue.
  • AI and developer tooling, including Wrangl, which turns any REST API into an MCP server, and the Driftwatch MCP feed.
  • Experiments that run where you would not expect them to: creatures that evolve to walk in a browser tab (Ambulo), a chess engine trained from scratch (Nimzo) and a bytecode VM in Rust (cellvm).

How I work

I like hard problems that end up in someone’s hands. I care about the parts that make software trustworthy: idempotency, honest numbers, offline-first apps, and pages that load fast on slow connections. I would rather ship a small thing that is correct than a large thing that only looks finished, and I write up what was hard so the next person, often me, does not have to rediscover it.

Background

I studied software engineering at Adama Science and Technology University. Before working independently I was a full-stack developer at iConnect, where I built an event management platform with Chapa payments, and a software engineering intern on the Adama Smart City project, building a property market API. Earlier, I mentored Ethiopia’s FIRST Global robotics team, designing and programming competition robots. The full timeline is on the experience page.

Elsewhere

If you want to work together or just talk about any of this, the contact page has the details.

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