About
I am 25 years old and currently living in Pretoria, South Africa. I have lived in South Africa, Ireland and the USA. When I am not programming, I enjoy being outdoors, fishing, playing with gadgets, building things and spending time with my lovely wife.
Early programming life
I first started programming late in high school when I discovered QBasic on my computer that I had built. Up until then, I was a big gamer and spent most of my weekends either skateboarding or “lanning”. After discovering Qbasic and writing my first “Hello World” program, I started searching the internet for cooler things I could build using QBasic and found that there was a rather large Qbasic game developers community.
I taught myself how to develop games using Qbasic and eventually moved on to C++ for building these little games. After a while of building games, I needed a way to share my games and get feedback. So, I decided I would teach myself how to develop a website where I could share my games and so I did. My first website was ugly and it took a few more redesign attempts to become a half decent web developer.
Eventually, I stumbled upon Google Adsense, and realized I could make money building websites and then decided to stop making games and focus on building websites. I learnt more advanced web development languages like PHP and MySQL and eventually started using WordPress.
Traveling and internships
After finishing high school in 2004, I decided to head over to the States and do an internship. I stayed in the Chicago/Indiana area and spent my days coding and learning about building businesses. During that time I grew as a developer and as an entrepreneur as well.
I left the States and returned to Ireland where I spent some time doing freelance development and then eventually, in 2006, I returned back to South Africa (my place of birth) to attend UNISA (University of South Africa) and I also volunteered at Sparrow Schools in Johannesburg in the IT classes. I had also just met my then girlfriend and now wife, Megg.
Startups and work
Around 2008, I joined a company called Younique who where in the social media space. After 3 months working for Younique, the founder of the company (Tyler Reed) decided he wanted to build a product and I tagged along as a partner and lead developer in a new startup called Aduity.
At Aduity, we built some impressive software! Our main product was a mobile advertising platform which handled millions of requests per month. We also built a WordPress plugin called MobilePress which has thousands of downloads to date.
Aduity grew, we got funding, built a small team and unfortunately in the end, things didn’t turn our quite as we hoped and Aduity was shut down. I left Aduity in March 2011.
Marriage
2011 was a tough year for me. I lost some good friends and overall my dreams and goals were not realized. However, there was a light at the end of that tunnel. On the 10th of December 2011, I got married to my then girlfriend of 5 years – Megg. It was a dream come true and I am looking forward to many years of happiness.
To the present
I am currently enjoying the freelance lifestyle. I hope to one day start another startup, but for now I am very appreciative to be doing work for some awesome clients. In my spare time, I usually hack on projects like WP Geeks and some of my other open source endeavors.
If you would like to get in contact with me, then I would love to hear from you!