Project Nairobi

Have you ever wanted to take your side projects to the next level, having them process thousands of data points per second? Everything from drone sensor readings to phone pings and camera footage. Welcome to Project Nairobi, where I'll be building a real-time distributed Analytics Platform on AWS, simulating a sprawling urban area of Nairobi, Kenya.

I’ve been interested in distributed systems for a while now. Recently, I realized imposter syndrome never truly goes away—you just learn to push through it. Letting my passion dispel my fears, I decided to dive in headfirst.

Another reason behind this project is that it allows me to visualize how a developing Africa could look as I gradually build out the digital infrastructure of a bustling city—my own “shameless fantasy.” I was born and raised in Rwanda, where I’ve seen firsthand how quickly a country can transform. Through Project Nairobi, I’m combining my passion for technology with the hope that these ideas might someday help shape a more connected, data-driven future—not just for Kenya, but for all of East Africa. It’s a small start, but it’s also a step toward dreaming bigger about the role I can play in my home region’s continued growth and innovation.

Goals & Learning Objectives:

  • Understand how to scale a distributed system
  • Develop a greater understanding of AWS services and how to coordinate them
  • Implementing fail saves on several levels
  • Share mistakes and lessons learned
  • Make some friends with shared interests
  • Become the 10x developer I was BORN to be!

I'm writing this blog to have some accountability to follow through with this project and not let it overwhelm me, and also to hold me to high standards for implementation since I'll be sharing my approach publicly, beginning with my architecture diagram below:

Next Steps

Next, I'll make a minimum viable product, beginning by setting up a simple EC2 instance to generate IoT-like data to feed into AWS Kinesis. Then, we'll process that data on Lambda and store it in DynamoDB. I'll try my best to keep these coming on a weekly basis to keep track of my progress. I hope you'll enjoy this as much as I plan to!

Author Of article : Loïc Rutabana Read full article