About Me

I am a DevOps Engineer from a Software Engineering background, with over 20 years of experience, and reside in Johannesburg, South Africa.

My very first computer was a Spectravideo SVI-728, on which I taught myself BASIC.

My next computer had an 8086 processor with a monochrome display, a 20MB hard drive and 2 x 5.25" floppy disk drives. After a while, I upgraded to an 80286 with a CGA display, and then in in 1991, I upgraded to a Pentium with a VGA display, on which I taught myself how to program in Pascal while I was in my final year of high school and studying Accounting.

I was fascinated by computer viruses and wrote a virus scanner in Turbo Pascal which could detect several different kinds of viruses by scanning the boot sector as well as files, but obviously it was not efficient as it should have been.

I ran a BBS (Bulletin board system) in my spare time, running RemoteAccess, which was a FidoNet node, which we used to exchange emails back in the days before the internet. I started off with a 1200bps modem, which I then upgraded to 28,800bps, and finally to 57600bps.

My sister gave me a net magazine for Christmas in 1994, and it came with a free internet subscription, which got me interested in the internet.

In 1995, I got a part time job working tech support at an ISP during the evenings, as I already had a full time day job as a Sales Administrator. I made an agreement with the ISP that I would work support in return for them hosting a Linux server in their server farm for me instead of paying each other. My server was running the Slackware Linux distribution, and I used it to teach myself Linux as well as PHP.

In 1999, I got a full time job working support at a different ISP where I handled technical support for dial-up customers, and then moved my server into the server farm of my new employer. An opportunity became available for a Systems Administrator role, and I applied and my application was successful thanks to my knowledge I had gained from hosting my own Linux server.

My main responsibilities were managing the DNS servers, web servers, and the Aardvark search engine (not the one that was acquired by Google). I knew what some of the pain points were from working in the call centre, where we had to log tickets for simple things such as resetting customer passwords, so I taught myself Perl and built tools to enable the call centre to assist customers in real time and more efficiently.

In 2002, I moved to the UK to join my ex-wife and got a job working for Motorola in their Software Distribution and Licensing department. My job involved a lot of manual work where I had to manually download software via FTP from various different development groups all over the world, verify checksums, create CD/DVD labels, burn the CD/DVDs etc, and then FTP the software to our sister team in China. This process was not scalable at all, so I created a tool called Automated Transfer System in Perl, where the development groups could enter all of the details for their software such as the version numbers, checksums, etc and the tool would automatically FTP the software, verify checksums etc, and one of my colleagues helped to extend it to automatically create the CD/DVD labels using Postscript and we had robotic CD/DVD writers that would automatically load the media, print the labels etc, so all that remained was to collect and package the physical media.

My manager was very happy with my work and promoted me as the supervisor of the team that packaged the physical media, and I was then given other projects to work on such as an Escrow System, for which I was awarded a Bravo award by Motorola, an Automated Software Licence Dispenser (since the software licences were generated manually), as well as a script that would automatically sync our database with the company LDAP/AD servers to remove any ex employees, for which I was awarded another Bravo award.

In 2007, I moved back to South Africa and got a job as a Perl Developer in the medical industry. In 2008, I got a job as a Senior PHP Developer in the online dating industry. In 2011, I became the Lead Developer for a social networking site specifically focused on mobile communities. In 2012, I went to work for the Mxit instant messaging app. In 2013, I went to work for the Seecrypt Secure Voice and Messaging app.

In 2014, I became a Software Architect working for one of the largest eCommerce websites in Nigeria and in 2015, I was promoted to Development Manager of the team responsible for building various different microservices to replace the Magento monolith. Most of our microservices were built in NodeJS.

In 2016, I became VP of Engineering for One Finance and Investments in Nigeria, where we were responsible for building the Paylater app (which was rebranded as Carbon), where I was unfortunately laid off.

I then went back to working in the medical industry, as well as a few startups including IoT and eventually decided that DevOps is where my passion lies and got a job as a DevOps engineer at one of the largest banks in South Africa.

Towards the beginning of 2022, I became a Lead DevOps and Infrastructure engineer where I work for the best photo booth software company in the world.