Soyapi Mumba

Thoughts on consumer tech, innovation and startups.
Founder of @Owinna; @TEDFellow; husband & father.
My views are mine only.

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

@liwucodes I stack them as all-day daily tasks on my Google Calendar(s) prefixed with a 1.x - 3.x number to sort them based on the "Urgent-Important" matrix

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

Congratulations Babatunde! 💪

[Owinna @owinna]

Babatunde Thanks FAM and Coaches After First Goal

Flames forward Babatunde Adepoju has thanked the FAM for giving him the opportunity to play for the national team, and the coaches for their trust after he netted his first international goal for Malawi.
https://t.co/j4YIGLeGnx

[Owinna @owinna]

#MatchDay

#AfricaGames
Eq. Guinea 21:00 Comoros
Niger 21:00 Mauritania

#EuropeanGames
France 21:10 N. Ireland

#WorldGames
Netherlands 20:45 Uzbekistan

#CAFOlympicWq
Djibouti W 15:30 Mauritius W
Comoros W 16:00 Sudan W

https://t.co/eQ3SKqLLaI

[Owinna @owinna]

Monday fixture ⚽ https://t.co/J5zNANdYUe

[Advait Arora @WealthEnrich]

Simply ❤️ this, nails perfectly🎯
Time management is just another word for 'focus'.
Zero-in on your goals, that's what separates winners from the ones who are aimless & distracted. 💯

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

Excited to DiVine launched. Congratulations @rabble!

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public https://t.co/LBIE9Q62Gg

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Addiction to short-form videos is associated with reduction of brain activity in the frontal lobe and weakened focus.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You needed to merge two PDFs last week.

You Googled "merge PDF free." You clicked the first result. You uploaded your tax return and your pay stub to a website you had never heard of. It merged them in 3 seconds. You downloaded the file and moved on.

You never thought about what happened to your documents.

They were uploaded to a server in a country you cannot name. Processed by software you cannot audit. Stored for a duration nobody disclosed. Your tax return. Your pay stub. Your salary. Your signature. On a stranger's disk. Forever.

You did this voluntarily. In under 10 seconds. Without reading a single word of fine print.

There is a tool that does everything those websites do. On YOUR computer. Your files never leave your machine.

It is called Stirling-PDF. 77,100+ stars on GitHub. 25 million+ downloads. The #1 PDF application on all of GitHub.

Here is what it does:

→ Merge PDFs. Split PDFs. Compress PDFs. Rotate and reorder pages.
→ Convert PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and images. And back again.
→ Add passwords. Remove passwords. Flatten forms. Sanitize metadata.
→ Sign PDFs with a drawn signature, typed name, or digital certificate.
→ OCR scanned documents with Tesseract to make them searchable.
→ Add watermarks, page numbers, headers, footers, and stamps.
→ Redact text and images permanently. Crop, deskew, and repair.
→ View and annotate PDFs directly in your browser.
→ No-code automation pipelines to batch-process thousands of files.
→ REST API for every tool. Automate every operation.
→ Desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. No browser needed.
→ One Docker command to self-host everything.

Here's the wildest part:

Adobe Acrobat Pro costs $19.99 per month. That is $239.88 a year.
Acrobat Studio: $24.99 per month. That is $299.88 a year.
Smallpdf Pro: $108 per year.
iLovePDF Premium: $60 per year.

A 10-person team on Adobe pays $2,660 a year to edit documents.

And every single one of those tools processes your files on THEIR servers.

Stirling-PDF processes everything locally. Your files exist on your machine. The server sits on your hardware. The network stays inside your walls.

77,100+ stars. 6,700+ forks. 175 releases. 4,900+ commits. 48% TypeScript and 43% Java.

MIT-licensed core. Self-host it. Fork it. Ship it.

100% Open Source.

(Link in the comments)

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

@liwucodes Nd'e kuli Joe.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Tobi built the original Shopify codebase himself in 2004. Then he spent 20 years doing what every founder-CEO does: slowly drifting into meetings, board decks, and strategy docs while the thing that made him dangerous collected dust.

94 commits in 2024. That’s a CEO who codes occasionally on weekends. 833 in 2025. That’s someone who found a way back in. 957 in 45 days of 2026. That’s a builder again.

The pattern repeating across tech right now is something nobody predicted about AI. Everyone focused on which jobs AI would replace. The bigger story is which skills AI is resurrecting. Founders who stopped coding a decade ago are shipping features. Executives who used to need a team of three to prototype an idea are doing it over lunch. The distance between “I have an idea” and “I built the thing” collapsed from weeks to hours.

Tobi’s been porting his own tools across languages using Claude as a compiler, publishing CLI utilities, and writing open source on his personal GitHub. The CEO of a $150B company is personally shipping to package managers on weekends.

That’s the part worth paying attention to. AI gave Tobi back the part of the job he loved and had to abandon to scale. The best founders were always builders first. The ones who drifted away didn’t want to. They just ran out of hours.

Now they have the hours back.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

I love this visual:

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

Congratulations to ICTAM Innovation Jam Awards 2025 winners:

K1.5 m

AgiTech: Zaulimi App
eHealth: National Digital Health System
Open Source: eFlood
SheCodes Spotlight: Chipatala+

K2m
FinTech & Digital Economy: Earn Mwachangu

K2.5m
Emerging Tech: The Blind Classroom

[{ Ade } @Adeleke_jaht]

@sama We are in a circle rn

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

@Suhail ... if he's good at the multiple jobs.

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

@Suhail He should be a consultant or start [a || couple of] startup(s)

https://t.co/dz0by4CbVz

[Africa Early Stage Investor Summit @AESIS_summit]

🔥 ICYMI – Our first #AESIS2025 virtual session brought the real talk on Africa’s early-stage investment scene.

Missed it? 🎥 Watch the full session now:
🔗 https://t.co/fR1IPA28YC

#AESIS2025 #AfricaBuiltToLast
#InvestInAfrica

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

⚠️ Eat your own [unrotten] dog food https://t.co/5c6cZEcQWg

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

Great initiative for future of Mother Malawi 🇲🇼

[UNDP Malawi @undpmalawi]

Teachers sing the Umunthu-Integrity anthem from the Corruption Free Malawi Sourcebook. The song calls for deep reflection on values & integrity. Their voices promise a generation that values honesty & accountability. @undpmalawi, @ACBMalawi & @MinOfEducation supported the book.

[Soyapi Mumba @soyapi]

@dhh When the simplest tool is also the fastest!

[DHH @dhh]

FactoryBot is the quickest way to kill your test suite performance with Rails. Our HEY suite runs in <2 mins on a modern Linux machine with over 30,000 assertions. Against a real database! The secret? Rails Fixtures! They're setup once, txn-wrapped for resets, and insanely fast.