licapeng (2022-2023)

Hello, I'm Tristan R. Heckart, 30, born in Nairobi, raised between Kenya and Portland, Oregon, and the guy currently keeping https://ke-bet.com/ alive, fast, and profitable even when Safaricom decides to have "maintenance" at 8 p.m. on a Friday.
I grew up in Westlands with M-Pesa beeping on every phone in the house and a 256 kbps Zuku line that felt like broadband luxury. My mom is Kikuyu, my dad is a very pale software engineer from Oregon who moved here in the late '90s chasing Y2K contracts and never left. By Form Three I was already running a small USSD betting pool-betting script for my classmates and getting suspended for "disrupting the local economy." Classic origin story.
Did computer science at Strathmore University, graduated top of my class, then immediately joined a FinTech startup that was trying to make mobile loans cool. Spoiler: it worked too well, and half of Nairobi owed us money. Spent four years building real-time credit scoring engines on Kafka and Flutter, learning exactly how fast money moves when you let Kenyans bet on the English Premier League with one tap.
In 2022, I cofounded the tech backbone of Ke-Bet.com and haven't looked back since. Today, I am the CTO and Head of Engineering for Kenya's sharpest sports betting and casino comparison site, running the whole stack: Go + Gin backend that handles 40 000+ concurrent live bets without blinking; Flutter web/mobile apps loading in under 1.5 seconds, even on 3G in Turkana; real-time odds aggregation from 30+ local and international bookies; and an M-Pesa integration so smooth that people literally deposit while standing in the boda-boda queue.
I am particularly proud of the fraud system we built; it catches the bonus farmers, multi-accounters, and VPN warriors before they even finish typing their fake ID number-all while staying 100% KRA- and Betting Control Board-compliant. Also built this little internal tool which auto-throttles deposits for anyone who has lost five bets in a row and starts chasing-we call it the "Tristan, don't let me be stupid" feature.
When I am not glued to Grafana or having an argument with Airtel about packet loss, you will find me trail-running Karura Forest at 5:30 a.m., brewing pour-over coffee that is awful, playing jazz keys at some Louis Leakey gig, or losing spectacularly at Call of Duty against my 19-year-old cousin who believes that 5G is "cheating."
Endgame: make Ke-Bet the fastest, fairest, most addictive-in-a-responsible-way betting platform in East Africa-ideally before Elon finishes Starlink over Nairobi so we can stop begging ISPs for mercy.