Fourteen years in financial software. These days I lead technology and product for trading platforms at Standard Bank Global Markets, the Online Share Trading app among them. That is two jobs wearing one title. I own the roadmap and I own the architecture, so every call gets argued twice. Once with the regulator in the room. Once with the system, which does not care what was promised.
Before that, Moniepoint. Merchant onboarding and verification for one of the fastest growing fintechs on the continent. Intelligent verification, automated AML checks, risk scoring, and the unglamorous business of moving a legacy system to microservices while it was still serving people. Before that, five years advising banks and fintechs. Event-driven services. Calculation and risk engines. The DevSecOps nobody thanks you for until the audit. Before that, .NET and Office 365 at Britehouse, and engineering roles going back to 2008.
I hire engineers and set technical direction. I still write code, though: leading was never an exit from the codebase, and most of what sits on this site started as something I wanted to exist.
Two of them outgrew the weekend. Sensure was a telematics startup I co-founded and was CTO of: an OBD-II device in the car and a React Native app, pricing insurance on how somebody actually drove rather than on their age and postcode. The architecture, the apps and the real-time backend behind the driver behaviour work were mine. It was a Santam Safety Ideas finalist in 2019 and took incubation at LaunchLab on the back of it. It is no longer running. SwingTribe is a golf booking and community platform. Fifty tribes and counting, golf unions included. It is also where I break things first: new architecture gets tried there long before it gets tried anywhere that matters.
Then there is golf. I carry a world amateur ranking, which reads better than it plays. Gweru raised me and Zimbabwe still gets me on a tee sheet, the mid-amateur circuit and the FBC Zim Open pre-qualifier among them. Golf is a microcosm. It measures more than fitness. It measures the quality of the week I have had and it is honest about it in a way almost nothing else is. SwingTribe was never really a business decision.
The rest goes on a camera. Stills first. Landscapes, macro, and whatever Johannesburg is doing that week. Then film, mostly from a drone, mostly in 4K. The waterfalls at Sabie. The Hennops trail. Mandela Bridge. An aircooled VW run through Cape Town.
Everything here is one of four things. Something I built. Something I photographed. Something I flew over. Or something I wrote down so I would stop explaining it twice. If any of it is worth a conversation, the contact page works.
