Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
I've always had a passion for bringing structure into my work with technology - both technically, and in the work I've done with people and process. workspark.io is the culmination of my experience growing and developing teams in high performance organizations. It brings my passions together, allowing me to spend time building a web product to help organizations build and develop their teams. On the people side, I've been deeply involved with management practices over the years. In my journey from Software Engineer to CTO, I've delivered frameworks for job architecture, performance management, OKRs, recruitment, risk management, budgets, and more. It's this experience which I am product-izing and shaping into what's become workspark.io. On the technical side, I'm passionate about building performant, scalable, well crafted systems. It's part of what led me to co-found ScaleConf - we wanted to bring world class speakers to South Africa to share their experience in building scalable systems, and give the local tech community a chance to share their own experiences.
Born from my experience as a manager in some of the highest performance cultures in South Africa and the world, WorkSpark is a natural outcome for me. WorkSpark is a SaaS product in the performance management space which brings together my technical and product background in building SaaS products, together with my passion for growing and developing high performance teams.
At AgrigateOne I worked deeply with the Technical and Product leadership teams to help bring clarity to the product vision, improve on product, development, and operational processes, restructure the teams to align with company objectives, improve management practices, and assist in reviewing their system architecture.
As a (fractional) principal engineer, I worked on complex projects which spanned the Bash and TFG engineering teams. Using the relationships built during my CTO tenure allowed me to play a role in bringing the right people together, and approach projects in a way that considered the strategic needs of both TFG and Bash.
As CTO at Bash, I was fortunate enough to work with an excellent executive team to help lead the tech team through the transition from TFG Labs to what has now become Bash.com. This involved extensive work in rebuilding teams, rebuilding systems, resetting the culture, and managing the team through the transition. We transitioned from legacy systems, modernizing everything from infrastructure, scalable backend services, deep observability, and frontend web and mobile apps.
ScaleConf was a first-of-it-kind conference we held in Cape Town, South Africa. It was a passion project with a focus on bringing international and local speakers together to share their experience and stories about building scalable systems. The first conference was run in January 2012 with around 300 attendees, 7 local speakers and 3 international speakers. We hung up our boots after 10 years. As Co-organizer, I engage with speakers and sponsors and also share a number of other responsibilities also associated with the venue, ticketing, the website, etc.
I worked closely with this ambitious passionate crew at a time where they had found some market fit and were growing and delivering on some incredible AI driven functionality for farmers. I focused on helping shape the team, and improve on some foundational elements such as systems observability, architecture, and building out a data strategy to drive more data driven decision making.