About
I'm Clif, a builder in Ghana. I like turning messy real-world problems into simple software and writing down what I learn while doing it.
Most of what I build starts with a question that bothers me enough to keep pulling at it. Sometimes the question becomes a product. Sometimes it becomes an experiment or an essay. I am usually most interested in the part underneath the interface — the data, incentives, rules and assumptions that make the product behave the way it does.
What I am building
My main project is Pumply, a crowdsourced fuel finder for Ghana. What started as a map of fuel stations turned into a much deeper problem around geospatial data, price freshness, station identity, crowdsourcing and trust.
I am also building Forecast, a play-credit prediction-market experiment focused on African events. Forecast has become a way for me to learn about market mechanisms, atomic state transitions, settlement, probability history and how to explain unfamiliar systems simply.
How I like to work
I care a lot about details, including details most users will never consciously notice. But I am learning that craftsmanship is not the same thing as refusing to ship. The goal is not perfection; it is understanding which details protect the product and which ones are just me polishing something because I can.
I use AI heavily when I build, but I do not want AI to become an excuse for not understanding the system. If a database rule exists, I want to know why. If authentication breaks, I want to understand the state transition that failed. If a map feels wrong, I want to know whether the problem is rendering, data, geography or product behaviour. I care more about being able to explain the system than about pretending I typed every line myself.
What I keep coming back to
Software and product design are the obvious interests, but the ideas that keep pulling me back are usually broader: systems, incentives, markets, maps, data quality, AI, human behaviour and how people make decisions under uncertainty. I like products where the interface looks simple but the underlying system has to take reality seriously.
That is also why I write. Writing forces me to explain what I think I understand, and usually exposes the parts I do not understand yet.
Why this site exists
I wanted one place that was not just a portfolio of finished screenshots. This site is where I can show the work, explain the mechanisms behind it, keep notes on things I am learning, and leave a record of how my thinking changes over time.
Some things here are finished. Some are experiments. Some are just thoughts I want to remember. I am okay with that. The point is to keep building things and learning out loud.