Part-time full stack web developer · Laravel + Vue.js

I think I'm kiln it.

You need someone who keeps a Laravel and Vue billing platform steady for 200+ studios, closes what customers report, and builds internal tools staff actually want to open. That has been my day job for most of a decade.

Ndifon Desmond Yong — Malico to most people. Backend and full-stack engineer, Douala, Cameroon. UTC+1, so my afternoon is your morning. Full history at malico.me/timeline.

Reply to this See how I read the product

Your list, my receipts

Point by point

No padding. Where I'm strong I say so; where I'm not, that's below too.

PHP and Laravel, several years
Since 2019. SchoolFAQs from empty repo to product on Laravel and Inertia, freelance Laravel APIs for AirGateway and Zudello, and a Laravel curriculum platform now running for Cameroon's Ministry of Secondary Education.
Vue.js, Options API
Vue and Nuxt in production at Emlogicx and across Inertia front-ends. Options API is the dialect I learned first, so there's no re-learning curve.
MySQL and performance
Ran a high-traffic PHP platform at Psicología y Mente: 200,000 users, 25,000 professionals. Query and index work, Redis caching, Cloudflare at the edge.
REST APIs and integrations
REST and GraphQL at FaithyApp and Psicología y Mente, plus the backend behind a music-school network serving 30,000 users.
Billing
Owned billing, authentication and content automation on FaithyApp's backend. Subscription state, entitlements, webhooks, and the failure modes that come with them.
Customer-reported bugs
Most of my Psicología y Mente work was exactly this: inherit a legacy system, reproduce the report, fix the cause, leave it smaller than I found it.
Git, Tailwind, DigitalOcean
Git daily. Tailwind is my default CSS. Deployed and maintained on DigitalOcean at Emlogicx, plus AWS, Azure and Cloudflare elsewhere.
Availability
15–20 hours a week, and I'm flexible on which ones. UTC+1 puts my afternoon in your morning, and I'm reachable across your whole week.
Stripe
The honest one. I've built and operated subscription billing, but not against Stripe's API specifically. I'd expect to be useful on it inside a week and slow on it for the first few days. Worth you knowing before you reply.

Closest to your work

Three projects

MINESEC curriculum platform
Subcontract · Laravel · minesec.ndahi.net

Curriculum management for Cameroon's Ministry of Secondary Education. Real institutional users, real approval chains, real consequences when a record is wrong.

  • Laravel backend modelling subjects, programmes and curriculum versions across a national school system.
  • Role-based access for ministry staff, inspectors and schools — the same shape as your studio, staff and admin split.
  • A review and publication step, so a change is proposed and checked rather than typed straight into production data.
Psicología y Mente
Backend engineer · 2023–2024

Kept a high-traffic PHP platform upright for 200,000 users and 25,000 professionals. Upgraded legacy code, automated the SEO pipeline, added an AI matching layer between users and professionals, and pushed load off the origin with Redis and Cloudflare.

This is the closest analogue to your posting: reliability, performance and customer-reported bugs on a system I did not write.

SchoolFAQs
Software engineer · 2019–2021
Architected and built the backend and first UI of a SaaS matching students to study materials and past exam papers from universities nationwide. Laravel and Inertia, empty repository to running product.

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 unglamorous parts that have to keep working while nobody thinks about them.

I like inherited codebases, genuinely. There's something satisfying about a system someone else built under pressure, and the slow work of making it smaller and calmer without breaking the people depending on it. Your line about spotting chances to simplify is why I read the posting twice.

Right now the thing I'm most interested in is my own AI workflow, which is why I've been building Inter and pluk. Both are on the third page, along with what I'd actually do in the first weeks here.

I'm a minimalist, on the go and at the keyboard. I own little, I travel light, and I build the same way: the fewest moving parts that fully do the job, then stop. It's why page two looks the way it does, and why I'd rather delete a file than add one.

I've never thrown a pot. I did read your site closely enough to borrow your brown and your amber, which I hope reads as attention to detail rather than as a copyright matter.