About
I'm a front-end leaning full-stack developer with more than 10 years of professional web development experience. I enjoy coding as a day job and as a hobby (check out my open-source projects).
When not coding I enjoy being outdoors and love hiking and trail running. I grew up in South Africa before moving to London, then Barcelona. I recently moved back to the UK and am currently residing in beautiful rural North Yorkshire.
Technical Skillset
I love working with JavaScript & TypeScript and work with these technologies daily. On the front-end I'm an experienced React developer who is able to architect large scale React applications. While I choose to specialise in React I have a great deal of professional experience with many JavaScript libraries & platforms.
On the back-end I love working with Node.js
,
C#
/.NET
(5+), Java
&
Python
. I've only recently picked up
C#
/.NET
development again due to the
multi-platform support that comes with .NET 5
.
While I generally love the tools that Microsoft provide I still
prefer MacOS
or Linux
as a development
platform. I've been working with GNU/Linux
for
quite a few years now and doing remote work on Linux server over
SSH
is second nature. VIM
is my text
editor of choice on the command line and VS Code
on
the desktop. I'm comfortable working with both NoSQL &
Relational Databases like
MySQL
/MariaDB
,
SQL Server
, MongoDB
etc.
For network communication I'm proficient with standards and
technologies like REST
, GraphQL
,
gRPC
, OpenAPI
, JSON
,
Protobuf
etc. I've got quite a bit of
experience of working with gRPC
&
OpenAPI
code generation tools and like to work with
well defined schemas and strictly typed data & network
layers.
I'm familiar with popular cloud computing platforms like
AWS
& Azure
, as well as
application lifecycle & project management tools like
Azure DevOps
, JIRA
,
Confluence
, GitHub
etc. I enjoy
setting up build pipelines and love writing shell scripts and
automating things. I'm comfortable working with
Docker
, Vagrant
,
Virtual Machines
, LXD
etc.
I like to write tests, not too many, and just the right type of tests. I generally prefer integration or E2E tests over many unit tests but I'm familiar with the tradeoffs & benefits of both approaches.
I mostly stick to web development but I'm interested in
doing more native mobile app development. I'm currently
specialising in React Native
but also have a bit of
experience with Objective C
and
Java
app development, but would like to up-skill
more in this department.
Achievements
The proudest achievement in my Open Source career is getting one
of my open source projects adopted by Microsoft.
Gradle Tasks, a popular VS Code extension for Gradle
I wrote,
is now owned by Microsoft. Have a gander at the
LICENCE. See
Microsoft Adopted One of My Open Source Projects.
In my professional career I was most proud to be promoted to a Senior Software Engineer at Skyscanner. I was with Skyscanner for 4 years and gained a lot of great experience working there. The company is a big software house filled with around 1000 engineers and the technical bar was set pretty high.