About

I’m Jason - a young, enthusiastic and motivated software engineer and entrepreneur!

My passion lies at the intersection of technology and business. With a decade of programming experience under my belt and a desire to craft software solutions that solve real-world problems, I’m taking every opportunity I can get to expand my skill-set and build things that make a difference.

Things I’m doing

1. Independent Contractor - working as an independent contractor to assist organisations or individuals with their various tech needs. From prototyping and MVP building, to technical due-diligence and advising - if its tech related, I’ve got you covered. Follow this link to organise a time for us to connect and see how we can work together.

Things I’ve done

1. Travelling the world - (March 2024 - Nov 2024) for 8 months I travelled the world. I started off in Vietnam exploring the country by train, bus and bike. I then worked on Botree pepper farm in Kampot Cambodia, where I taught tourists about the history of Kampot pepper and the farming and production techniques. I hiked the Annapurna circuit, Poonhill and Annapurna Base Camp treks in Nepal. I helped build a hotel in the foothills of Almaty, Kazakhstan and did a road trip around Issyk-Kul Lake, Kyrgyzstan where I also summited peak Uchitel at 4500m in Ala Archa national park. I then proceeded to travel explore Europe and the UK by train visting loads of friends and family and immersing myself in history and architecture. I also completed the Tour du Mont Blanc in 7 days. My travels ended with a bikepacking trip from Turin, Italy to London, UK covering 1800km+ and 10000m of elevation gain and descent.
2. Co-founder and engineering lead at Artbeat - (Dec 2022 - Jan 2024) a startup building the world’s first peer-to-peer, social-commerce art market, empowering artists and collectors to trade art directly with each other, cutting out the middleman and reducing the cost of trading art. My responsibilities have included: establishing our CI/CD pipelines, building out the MVP (frontend and backend) and managing the dev team. My roll has now shifted to be primarily focused on the backend development and management with2 of my team-members, Mike and Taine on the Frontend.
3. Software Engineer at Alis Build - (Feb 2022 - Sep 2023) a cloud-native operating system for enterprise, our mission is to help organisations “Build their own innovation” by making it easy to define, build, deploy, and manage cloud-based applications. Skills: Golang, Protocol Buffers and gRPC, CI/CD pipelines, GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud Build, Bigtable and more), CLI development, Full-stack
4. Internship at Fanfire - (Dec 2021 - Jan 2022) a Web3 stratup where I built a PoC ticketing solution using the blockchain. Kind’ve like the Howler app, but the tickets are NFTs. Skills: React, Solidity, Ethereum, Blockchain development, Full-stack.
5. Grow@BCG 2020 - consulting competition where select applicatns were placed in teams and tasked with identifying solutions for addressing HIV prevalence amongst young and at risk women by focusing on creating employment opportunities
6. SU Hackathon 2019 - part of the winning team of the 2019 SU hackathon where we built a PoC that would help enable rural and poor communities to seamlessly engage in internet banking using bluetooth.

Things I’ve learnt

• BSc in Mathematical Science (Mathematical Statistics and Computer Science), Stellenbosch University - completed degree Cum Laude and learnt a lot about maths, stats, and computer science (sounds obvious, I know)
• GCP - versed and proficient in Google Cloud Platform, I am effective at leveraging Google products to create software solutions
• gRPC and Protocol Buffers - a more niche and lesser known technology, I have used gRPC and Protocol Buffers to build microservices extensively: watch as this becomes the future for building APIs and distributed systems
• Go and various other programming languages - Go is by far my favourite language, but I have worked with many others, including Python, Java, C, JavaScript, TypeScript and various Frontend frameworks including React, React-Native and Vue. Currently dabling with a bit of Flutter
• DevOps pipelines: I’m well-versed at managing CI/CD pipelines using a variety of tools such as Google Cloud Build and Github Actions and effectively establishing pipelines to migrate features from dev to production that empower teams, support management and improve velocity
• Firebase: I’m a massive lover of Google Firebase and have used it extensiely building for my startup as well as when playing around in side-projects in Flutterflow. It amazes me the speed at which ideas can be protoyped using this epic Backend-as-a-service (BaaS).

Things I’m learning

• GCP - with incredible products and features being released all the time, I’m constantly on the lookout for things I can leverage in the products I’m working on
• Flutter - I’m very keen to learn flutter as a framework for building web and mobile applications from a single code base
• Go - such a beautiful, expansive language, there’s always space to learn new things
• Product management - any small company requires the CTO to also low-key be a product manager, so I’m learning how to do that with my particular favourite reading thus far being Inspired. I’m currently reading Build by Tony Fadell.

Things I like

• Birkenstocks - sturdy, comfortable, and stylish
• Huberman labs - invaluable lessons about our biology and how to be a high functioning individual
• Golang - undoubtedly the greatest programming language ever created
• Coffee - brain juice, reinforcer
• Music - jazz, electronic, hip-hop: Floating Points, Four Tet, Bonobo, Matthew Halsall, Tom Misch, Yussef Dayes, Badbadnotgood, Alfa Mist, A Tribe Called Quest
• The simple things in life - cold morning swims, hikes in the mountains, beers with friends, parks, dogs, cats, birds
• Fly-fishing - they say to earn a small fortune in the fly-fishing industry, start with a large fortune: hopefully one day I’ll retire to a beautiful river somewhere and spend my days fishing and writing code
• Minimal design - less is more
• Backend > Frontend - I’m a backend guy, but I can do frontend too
• Dark > Light - dark mode is the only mode

Things I don’t like

• The laziness of modernity - social media, overstimulation, dopamine addiction
• Kak people - people who are kak
• People who don’t like Birkenstocks - also fall under the bracket of “kak people”
• Rusticans - Go is the better language, and Gophers are the better people

Interests

• Golang
• Protocol Buffers and gRPC
• Web3 and blockchain technology
• Google Cloud Platform
• Firebase and other Backend-as-a-Service products
• LLM applications
• Low-code and no-code tools