City Varsity

University of Cape Town

Bergvliet High

Co-Founder and CTO at FlexClub

Skills: Technology Management · Leadership · Strategy · Architecture

Dragonfly

Head of Technology

Pattern

Startup Advisor

FlexClub

Skills: Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Leadership · Team Management

Solutions Architect

FlexClub has undergone a number of pivots over its lifespan but at its core it was about giving people access to vehicles. To achieve this, we worked with organisations such as Uber, Bolt, AVIS and Europcar.

A customer’s viability would be assessed using either Uber API data accessed via an OAuth token or our risk profiling algorithm based on banking history, KYC and credit score.

➜ Defined and developed a technology strategy that supported our the business strategy.
➜ Grew and managed globally distributed teams.
➜ Architected a robust and flexible platform that could accommodate our different strategies.
➜ Worked closely with stakeholders at other departments to align on strategy and explore ways to empower them through technology.
➜ Worked closely with merchant partner organisations on the design of the product.
➜ Compiled financial forecasts for teams and services.

Rotally is an employee database designed to serve the needs of restaurants. With a long term vision of managing all aspects of restaurant employees. Rotally is an employee database designed to serve the needs of restaurants. With a long term vision of managing all aspects of restaurant employees.
As Technical Advisor I worked with the company CEO to develop it’s technical strategy as an early stage start up.

Rotally

Technical Advisor

A peer-to-peer car rental platform for Uber drivers. One of the first companies to gain access to the Uber API we leveraged this data to generate a heuristic-based risk profile.

➜ Led teams of freelance and outsourced developers to build our platform.
➜ Managed relationships with fleet partner customers.
➜ Put together supporting policies and supporting documentation to satisfy GDPR requirements.

DriverSelect

Co-Founder and CTO

Built South Africa's first peer-to-peer car rental platform. It was supported by an innovative insurance system that allowed for additional cover only during the rental. It consisted of a rental marketplace, a two-sided customer dashboard where renters and owners could manage their rentals and vehicles, and an admin interface for the customer support team to help manage rentals.

Some highlights:
➜ Created a multi-channel recurring payment system that included a pro-rata calculations.
➜ Developed rental workflow to allow owners and renters to interact and organise a rental.
➜ Designed and built a review and rating system modelled after AirBnB's.
➜ Developed a calculator using vehicle prices to determine what a person could earn by renting out their vehicle.

RentMyRide

8bit had garnered significant attention and their initial software platform was not sufficient to service their increasing demand. I was brought on by the 8Bit team to help them scale.

We approached this systematically, scaling each component of the system in turn. Firstly I replaced their article service with ElasticSearch. Then re-configured their EC2 instances to be more efficient. Finally overcame a limitation of RDS by re-routing their impression traffic through a NATS.io messaging queue and custom built Golang workers. I used NATS.io as at the time the traffic was too heavy for more well-known queues such as RabbitMQ.

I also developed:
➜ a personalised content / ad recommendation engine based on customer interaction wiith the widget using DynamoDB and HiveSQL.
➜ a campaign manager that would limit ad impressions in real-time using DynamoDB. It allowed advertisers to specify the number of impressions per day or even per hour and then the system calculated the number of ads to show per period, stopping serving the ads as soon as the ads reached the specified limit - which could happen in seconds.
➜ an article API which allowed 8bit to build custom article aggregation portals.

8Bit Inc

Web Architect

At Ekaya we pioneered a risk profile using banking and credit score data that users could share with property agents and introduced an easy to use rental insurance package for property owners.
The first version of Ekaya was a show house finder. Developed as a mobile first web application it enabled property agents to create show houses that could be navigated to using Google Maps for directions and PostGIS to do the geo-location crunching in the background.
After being accepted into the 88mph accelerator we pivoted to being a rental property finder which allowed the user to search & filter for properties using an interactive map as well as view recommended similar properties.

Ekaya.com

Co-Founder & CTO

Web back and front end development. PHP,  XHTML, XML, MySQL etc.

➜ a Single Sign-on System
➜ A gateway API for a mobile game

ViaMedia (Pty) Ltd

Web Developer

Ogilvy Interactive was the digital arm of advertising power house Ogilvy. We produced work for big-name clients such as Audi, Volkswagen, Old Mutual, and MWEB.
Highlights:
➜ Won a Gold Loerie for an Audi microsite.
➜ Did information architecture, usability and programming on the MWEB Help Portal.
➜ Built an Oware (strategy game from West Africa) simulator with a wicked AI for opponent.
➜ Built a desktop widget for Old Mutual which was updated with weather and podcasts.
➜ Built a "Decorate your Christmas tree" Flash game which let users place ornaments on a tree. Once the design was done, it took a "screenshot", compressed the image using a custom built compression algorithm, streamed it to a server, which converted the raw data into an image which could be downloaded.

Ogilvy Cape Town

Developer

Redshift was a boutique multimedia house.
➜ Built a Jewish-inspired clone of BubbleBobble called POP613 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9GNsAZWzvw) a lot of attention was given to mimicking the original arcade game's gameplay and functionality.
➜ Developed and maintained the Design Indaba website.
➜ Built a skinnable online Bingo game in Flash / ActionScript.

Redshift Digital

➜ Built an interactive CD-ROM for the Cape Town International Convention Centre

Rudolf Vavruch