Who I Am
Accomplished Software Specialist with 15+ years of experience building gaming and financial platforms. Distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure), and microservices are my daily territory. Led teams across multiple regions, cut production incidents through structured testing and monitoring, and shipped production systems that held up under real load. Actively building and integrating AI-powered features into products and using AI tooling throughout the development workflow.
Core Specializations
Background
Based in Durban, South Africa, my career has run from banking platforms processing real-time payments to gaming infrastructure used by players worldwide. The common thread is systems that hold up under serious load.
The technical work I'm proudest of usually involved finding a way out of an expensive corner. The Titan vShim let 200+ legacy games run on a new platform without a multi-year rewrite. Forge, the AWS-based remote gaming system I co-built, handled over 1,000 bets per second per operator and cut deployment cycles from days to hours. The Archon Config Testing Framework reduced Sev A incidents by 80%. I spoke at GDC 2023 on the architecture behind it. These aren't CV lines. They're systems I built, shipped, and still stand behind.
AI is part of how I build. I design and ship AI features in production systems and use AI tooling throughout the development workflow. It lets a small team move faster and spend more time on the decisions that actually need a person.
The people part matters as much as the code. I've mentored engineers across South Africa, Europe, and India, ran a training programme in Pune, and worked with distributed teams across time zones. Three of those engineers were promoted. I care about building teams that keep working well after I've moved on to the next thing.
What Drives Me
🎯 Technical Excellence
I care about code that's functional but also readable by whoever inherits it. Good architecture has to survive contact with reality, not just the original design session.
🚀 Continuous Innovation
I follow new technology closely but I'm selective about what I adopt. Cloud-native patterns and zero-downtime deployments aren't interesting because they're new — they're interesting because they solve real problems.
👥 Team Growth
Some of the work I'm most proud of has nothing to do with code. Watching an engineer go from uncertain to trusted has stayed with me longer than most architectural decisions.
🤖 AI in Practice
I've shipped AI features in production and use AI tooling daily. It's useful for some things and actively unhelpful for others. The skill is knowing which is which before you've spent two hours on a suggestion that just seemed right.
💡 Business Impact
I've spent enough time in stakeholder meetings to know that technical excellence counts for nothing if it doesn't connect to something the business actually cares about. I make that translation a deliberate part of how I work.
How This Site Was Built
This portfolio was designed and implemented by me using Jekyll, custom Liquid templates, and hand-written CSS. A large portion of the site's content is generated from my official CV through an automated extraction workflow that parses the source document, merges it with curated structured data, and publishes it across the site from a single source of truth. GitHub Copilot, guided by a tailored suite of skills, agents, and instructions, was used as an assistive development tool to speed up implementation, refactoring, and content iteration.