It all started with
a simple question.
“How does a phone actually work?”
So I opened one.
Every layer was a lesson. I wanted to know what each one did, and why.
Inside, I found a story written in silicon.
I had to learn to read it. Then I started writing my own.
Then I went deeper.
I took that curiosity to the repair bench at Dexters Electronics in Nairobi. Phones, consoles, laptops. I learned microsoldering and board-level repair the hard way, one dead device at a time.
Microsoldering
Component-level rework under the microscope.
Level AAA repair
Board-level fault finding, BGA reballing, dead-short tracing.
Phones · Consoles · Laptops
If it has a circuit, I can bring it back.
Diagnostics, not guesswork
Measure, isolate, prove. It is still how I debug code.
Reballing chips thinner than a fingernail. Tracing a short across a board half the width of a coin. Every repair taught me the same thing: machines are logical, and anything logical can be understood.
Then a new question: how are apps made?
Hardware showed me how machines work. Software was how you tell them what to do. Honestly, it looked like sorcery, and I wanted in. So I went to university and sharpened everything.
Nairobi School
High school. The place where curiosity picked up some discipline.
KCA University
BSc Software Development
Algorithms, systems, databases and software engineering. The theory behind the sorcery.
Dexters Electronics
Electronics repair expert
Microsoldering and board-level repair on phones, consoles and laptops.
The Odin Project
Full stack curriculum
JavaScript, Node.js and React, learned by building.
AWS Training
Cloud Practitioner Essentials · Architecting on AWS
The foundations of running software at scale.
Crosstech
Full stack developer
Led the e-commerce platform, from storefront to POS to M-Pesa.
African Tech Community
Contributor
Giving back to the ecosystem that taught me.
Independent
Freelance engineer
10+ web and mobile projects, with Stripe, M-Pesa and PayPal integrations.
Orderly
Founder & architect
A restaurant operating system, built from zero.
Orderly AI · Maina AI
Graduated from KCA University
Agents that run real business operations.
Maina Group
Director & CEO
Two startups, one main company, and a plan to build an African tech giant.
My curiosity always got the better of me. Every answer came with a better question, so I kept going: deeper into the code, deeper into the systems, deeper into how it all connects.
The soldering iron became a keyboard.
I stopped fixing the machine.
I started telling it what to do.
Real code from Orderly AI, the agent that runs a restaurant kitchen.
From fixing machines to telling them what to do.
PHP and JavaScript became my home ground. At Crosstech I led the build of a full e-commerce platform with POS, affiliates, inventory and M-Pesa. Then I built for businesses across Kenya.
<?phpPHP · Laravel · Yii=>JavaScript · React · Next.js · NodeSELECTMySQL · MariaDB · PostgreSQL · RedisShipped for real businesses. Keep scrolling →
Crosstech.ke
A full e-commerce system for an electronics retailer, covering storefront, POS, affiliates, inventory, role-based access, SMS and M-Pesa.
ByteDeals
An electronics and lifestyle marketplace with a product catalogue, order tracking and M-Pesa checkout.
Hinata Pharmacy
An online pharmacy with prescription uploads, inventory tracking and SMS order updates.
Invexia
A property listing platform with agent profiles and listings.
Ukiyo LifeShop
A multi-currency wellness store built for a global audience.
Celebrat
An online store the business uses to drive sales and manage its catalogue.
DST Fiber
The website for an internet service provider, and the first client he ever built for.
Kenire
A corporate website for Kenire Business Solutions.
Patnan Investment
A property advertising website with a solid backend that gets listings seen.
Lifeline Hospital
The web presence for a healthcare facility, with services and patient information.
Handassah Textiles
An online store that streamlines sales for a textiles business.
Open source
A free M-Pesa gateway and TikTok, Instagram and Facebook feed plugins for Botble stores, plus an AI device-diagnostic tool.
So I built my own. From zero.
Orderly is a complete restaurant operating system. I architected every app from scratch: ordering, service, kitchen, dispatch, and the platform underneath all of it.
Built for Kenya, built to last.
I designed an update-safe module architecture, so custom features survive every upstream release. Local payments and tax compliance are built in, not bolted on.
Maina CMS
A content management system I wrote myself. It now runs e-commerce and bookings too, and it sits underneath the group's products.
Link Me Up
One link for a Kenyan business, with WhatsApp, M-Pesa till, directions and catalogue, plus a QR poster for the counter.
Now I build the minds.
I'm training Orderly AI and Maina AI to take on real business operations: agents that know the menu, the kitchen and the books.
Orderly AI
A multi-provider engine I built on Claude and OpenRouter. Its agents take orders by chat, run the kitchen queue, mark dishes sold out and log waste.
Watchers
Background agents that catch stuck orders, failing payment gateways and status drift before a human notices.
Guardrails
Encrypted keys, model policies, usage metering and a full audit trail on every action an agent takes.
Maina AI
The next step: AI trained to ease day-to-day operations for businesses across the group and beyond.
Curiosity took me from the phone to the circuit, from the circuit to the code, and from the code to intelligence. A polymath, second only to the AI I'm training.
Two startups. One company. Everything tech.
Orderly and Airtaker are my startups. Maina Group is the main company, and it does pretty much everything in tech. I'm the Director and CEO. Some days, the overlord.
Alvin Maina & Nba Ngure
Nobody builds an empire alone. Nba is my partner at Maina Group, and together we are taking the group from Nairobi to the rest of Africa.
Maina Softwares
The flagship. Where the group's software and AI are built and deployed for businesses. Home of Orderly, Maina CMS and Link Me Up.
Maina AI
AI trained to take on real business operations.
Maina Compute
The infrastructure that keeps the cloud services online.
Maina Energy
Power for the compute. Uptime starts at the socket.
Airtaker
Built to redefine the Kenyan property market, with automated M-Pesa rent collection, digital invoicing and real-time reporting for landlords and tenants.
Maina Racing
Because why not.
The goal: build one of Africa's great technology corporations. Software, AI, compute and energy, made in Nairobi for the whole continent.
Red has something on me.
I'm a racing addict and I back the red teams. That's also why Maina Racing is on the roadmap.
Next stop: the datacenter.
I started with one phone on a workbench. Next, I want to work on racks in a data hall. Maina Compute and Maina Energy already keep my cloud services online. Same curiosity, bigger machines.