How it started:
My love for computers started with a Comodore Vic-20 and a guide on how to program BASIC back in 1980. My first for and while loops shortly followed and I was hooked. While I really did not understand what I could achieve with the loop constructs back then I enjoyed it so much I programmed any chance I got and over the years got a very solid background in BASIC.
As technology progressed over the years I moved onto more "advanced" hardware such as a the Commodore 64 and finally made the massive leap to a IBM clone with a 4.7Mhz XT chip, a whopping 640Kb of Ram and a 20MB hard drive. This new technology of magnetic disks instead of tapes was unbelievable. I never filled that 20 Megabytes of hard drive and thought you could never have so much data. I programmed in GWBasic feverishly. A couple of years down the road during school vacation(I was about 10) I stopped by a computer store in a nearby city. Here I was shown a demo of the new language called C. The store assistant showed me the difference in speed of C compared to BASIC. Immediately I wanted to get a copy of this language however I could not afford the compiler so I bought a how to program in C book and studied it relentlessly. Finally I got a copy of Turbo C(call it a educational copy) and immediately tried to program games, word processor and databases.
Most of these projects were complete failures but I learned as much as I could. I also developed a healthy appetite for games and decided that I want to be a games developer. Anyway after I finished school I attended a college to do a Computer Science diploma. I did C/C++ as my major subject and I went all out with my projects. However I still wanted to program games and started doing low level VESA driver programming in assembler to get that magic mode 13 the 256 colour mode in DOS. After weeks of programming after hours I finally created my first game which sadly was a copy of Pong. However I used 3D Studio to create some rather impressive sprites and it looked better than the Atari version. The whole experience of programming the hardware directly was incredibly informative for me. My projects for college was taken to the next level with custom assembler menu systems and I had a couple of confused lecturers ask me to explain what I was doing. Even though I aced my exams and project I never finished the diploma due to some unfortunate circumstances and bad decisions on my part.
I started working in IT in 1998 and have been going non stop. Most of my working life has been doing development and DBA type duties mostly with MSSQL server(6.5 and up),Delphi and Java. The C/C++ market here in South Africa seems to be reserved for the Engineering crowd. While I enjoyed working with the secret sauce software and systems I always felt a little constricted as I had no real knowledge of how it really works. When Vista came out I made the move to Linux permanently as I had more issues with it than I care to recall. When I made the move I started coding in C/C++ again and I rediscovered a old love. In the open source community I have felt a sense of excitement and passion that will keep me in love with Computers for a very long time. In retrospect I should have made this move a long time ago but at least I made it.
Projects I have been involved with:
In my career I have been involved with a lot of development work some more memorable some less memorable. It would be impossible to list all the moments but I will list 10 of the bigger projects/moments. Yes there has been one or two times that I made a mess(we all code our first endless loop as some point).
- Design and development of new ETL process for Engen.
- Design Of Mxit Music Database
- Watching my databases handle 200 logins per second (Mxit).
- Recovering servers with catastrophic hardware failuires.
- Moving Mxit Database Infrastructure to new servers while remaining online 24X7 (harder than it sounds).
- Design and development of TradeCIS Lite stock trading application for MCI Consultants.
- Successfully managing 5 servers with 15 000 users (with under 2 years experience).
- Design and development of Project Lighthouse for Barclays Bank Africa.
- Designing and developing the NuPay TSP system.
- Designing and developing Real Time Stock trading applications.