Newton Mbugua
fig. 1
Fullstack Developer · Data Engineer

Newton Mbugua

Four years building things that actually work — web apps, data pipelines, and the occasional thing that surprises even me. Based in Kenya. Currently doing data engineering.

Backend

Node.jsPythonExpresstRPCREST

Frontend

Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwindAstro

Data

AirflowSeleniumPlaywrightETLDocker

Recent Writing

Open notebook →

Playwright vs Selenium: A Real-World Data Engineering Perspective

5 Mar 2025

I've used both in production scrapers. Here's the honest comparison nobody writes — including the part where Selenium still wins.

Turbo Monorepos: Why I Stopped Fighting and Started Enjoying It

20 Jan 2025

Setting up a Next.js + Astro + shared packages monorepo with Turborepo — the parts no one documents.

Building Reliable ETL Pipelines with Python & Airflow

12 Nov 2024

Hard lessons from orchestrating data pipelines at scale — what breaks, what holds, and how to sleep at night.