Who Am I?
I design and build high-availability systems with a focus on SRE principles, cloud-native architecture, and DevOps culture. My career spans from hands-on development to architectural leadership across fintech, backup/disaster recovery, and ed-tech industries.
I strive to obtain functional and technical knowledge of all systems I interact with at a micro and macro level. Focus is always on high availability, high throughput, maintainability, cost effectiveness, and measurability.
My Expertise
DevOps & SRE
Having started my career in application and customer support, I understand and evangelize the need for operations and development capabilities to work together. Designing systems for 99.99%+ uptime with proper SLOs, monitoring, and incident response.
Development
I love designing and building systems. From back end to front end and everywhere in between. In-house tools or client facing, it's all a fun challenge.
Platform Engineering
Building internal developer platforms, CI/CD pipelines, shared libraries, and AI-powered tooling. I love analytics, monitoring, automation and optimization. Knowing how everything works and finding ways to improve them is what drives me.
Tech Stack
Languages
Cloud & Infrastructure
Observability
Messaging & Data
AI & Automation
Projects
Prometheus Logstash Exporter
A Go-based exporter that collects and exposes Logstash metrics in Prometheus format, enabling comprehensive monitoring of Logstash pipelines and nodes.
AI Codebase Scribe
Automatically generates comprehensive documentation for codebases using various LLM providers including Claude, GPT, and local models via Ollama. Supports README, Architecture docs, and more.
TB Cache Manager
A flexible caching abstraction library built on CacheManager, providing a unified interface for in-memory and distributed caching with Redis support.
Halloween Maps
A mobile-first mapping application for coordinating trick-or-treating routes, showing real-time candy availability and optimized walking routes.
Experience
Architect
Oct 2023 - Present
- Leading architectural initiatives for the mobile app platform and Site Reliability Engineering.
- Built Kyros, an AI-powered code review system using AWS Bedrock and Claude for automated PR analysis across multiple languages.
- Developed automated documentation generation tools to improve developer productivity.
- Driving SRE practices including SLO definition, incident management, and observability improvements.
Software Engineer
1 yrOct 2022 - Sep 2023
- Part of the Platform & Innovation tribe responsible for ensuring core back-end systems consistently improved and kept up to date.
- As Redstor is considered a company's last line of defence for disaster recovery, we always needed to keep reliability and consistency in mind, and because we deal with client data, security was always the number one concern.
- Worked on provisioning and porting logic from legacy public monoliths into private microservices exposed via an API Gateway.
- Also joined the architecture and SRE chapters to contribute from a DevOps and operations perspective.
Full Stack Engineer
2 yrs 8 mosFeb 2020 - Oct 2022
- When I joined the company, it only had a few PHP powered CMS and LMS sites running on VMs. I worked closely with the architect to design a system that would meet all the company's strategic goals.
- Tasked with designing, developing, and deploying all infrastructure with production being cloud first, and development and test on a local DC for cost savings.
- Every system was created to be performant, highly available, auto correcting with auto scaling, while keeping cost in mind.
- Back-end systems were written in C# (.NET Core 3.1 then updated to 6), with logic extracted into SDKs stored in a private NuGet to standardize and speed up development.
- Systems included centralized logging and distributed tracing. Mix between message based (Kafka and SNS/SQS combo) as well as REST.
- Created multiple web apps to provide UI for finance, academic, and student support teams.
DevOps SRE
5 yrs 4 mosOct 2014 - Jan 2020
- Primary role was to provide 2nd and 3rd line support and incident management for 2 products. This entailed functional and technical support for all levels from customer facing mobile app, to API, to POS integration systems, to data stores and other underlying infrastructure.
- Started learning ASP MVC and created a personal MVC site to expose data in our data stores and provide a UI for our API calls. This site grew to become an integral part of the business.
- Set up multiple bespoke monitoring systems covering gaps where corporate monitoring solutions (NewRelic and Site24x7) could not. Created real-time dashboards ranging from general overview to financial dashboards for the CEO.
- Worked with multiple tech stacks: RabbitMQ/MQTT, SignalR, ElasticSearch, Redis, Prometheus, SQL Server, and C#.Net.
- Worked closely with Infrastructure, Change and Release Management, and Project Management teams to ensure operational activities would not interfere with products or services.
Senior 2nd Line Support
4 yrs 2 mosAug 2010 - Sep 2014
- Provided 1st and 2nd tier support to over 60 international companies. Part of the ESA team providing priority support for key customers, requiring international travel to clients' offices.
- Spent 3 months at corporate head office in CT, USA to train staff and set up a satellite support office to extend support to a full 24/7/365 model.
- Daily duties involved incident management, troubleshooting functionally as well as in source code (TSQL, Delphi, C#.Net), data analysis and minor development of bug fixes.
- As a senior analyst, stood in for department manager during international travel and maternity leave. Taught myself C# by developing internal tools that streamlined support processes.
Manager: IT & Billing
1 yr 3 mosVodashop Tygervalley Group
Mar 2009 - May 2010
- After successful implementation of the biometric time and attendance system, offered the chance to take over IT support for the group and oversee the in-house billing system.
- Provided full hardware and software support for all stores and head offices.
- Managerial duties entailed supervision and training of IT assistant, billing system administrator, and billing system assistant.
- Started interest in full stack development when I created an intranet housing reports and custom systems for HR department using Adobe ColdFusion.
Finance Assistant
1 yr 2 mosVodashop Tygervalley Group
Feb 2008 - Mar 2009
- Oversaw all aspects involving mobile phone accessories for over 24 Vodacom stores (5 in Garden Route, 1 in Sandton, rest in greater Cape Town area).
- Profile maintenance ensuring each store had correct collection of accessories to optimize sales, taking into account trending devices.
- In charge of order fulfillment from suppliers and to stores. Learned SQL (Firebird DB) for data mining to make informed decisions.
- Project manager for biometric time and attendance system implementation including setup, training, custom reports for HR, and post-implementation support.
Financial Officer
1 yr 3 mosLCD Consultants & Instant Mobile Solutions
Aug 2006 - Oct 2007
- Started as laptop technician mainly working on refurbishing ex-corporate laptops for resale.
- When the previous financial person left, offered the position of financial officer. Handled accounting up to trial balance, including inventory control and Pastel administration.
Matriculated
Curro Durbanville Private School
Jan 2004 - Present
- Matriculated from Curro Durbanville Private School