About

Work Experience

• Senior Web Developer, IGrow Group of Companies

  Mar, 2026 - Oct, 20267 months

  Senior developer across IGrow's four brands (Investments, Rentals, Real Estate International and Execu Move). I worked directly with management, marketing and the contact centre, and mentored the other three developers.

  • Rebuilt rentals.igrow.co.za on a custom theme with proper caching. GTmetrix grades went from E/F to A/B, and server load fell even as traffic grew in the months after launch.

  • Integrated the site with PropData, pulling in 200+ property listings on a schedule and keeping details and availability in sync.

  • Built a viewing-booking tool for the contact centre, tied into Zoho CRM for user accounts, leads and bookings. It's used by 25+ contact-centre staff, 10 rental agents and management (with role-based access) for 30+ bookings a day across 200 properties. Prospective tenants could also book viewings themselves, which took people out of a bottleneck to improve booking rates.

  • Scoped an agent roster generator to replace manual scheduling: agents grouped by area, a rules engine, and real Google Maps travel times to fit more viewings into each day, plus reporting for management.

  • Started a shared Web Components library for use across all four brands.

  • Set up and ran the Linux servers for the apps I built, with GitHub Actions pipelines running smoke and synthetic tests before every deploy.

  • Brought AI into the team's workflow: landing pages generated from briefs, brief-to-pull-request automation and automated code review. I handled the architecture and reviewed what the AI produced, and rebuilds that used to take months took days or weeks.

  • Built automations in Zoho Flow, SalesIQ and Zapier, and wrote direct API integrations where speed, security or data quality mattered. Worked with marketing to track ad spend and lead sources properly.

  • Cleaned up the WordPress sites: brought them up to date, removed plugins we didn't need and replaced them with our own code.

  • Set up Linear and the engineering workflow from scratch, then helped move the team to Jira.

• Founder & Full-Stack Developer, devNel

  Jan, 2018 - Present

  My own consultancy, building WordPress/WooCommerce and modern web projects (including Astro + Sanity), plus DevOps and AI work, mostly for non-technical clients.

  • Build sites end to end, from hosting and deployment to handover, with performance, accessibility and SEO built in.

  • Built two live sites for Quiver Café, a social-impact café in Cape Town, on Astro, Sanity and Cloudflare Workers. Online ordering is ready to go: Yoco payments and Uber Direct delivery that the owner switches on with a single toggle in Sanity.

  • Audit AI-focused projects for security and put guard rails around how teams use AI tools.

• Software Engineer (Full Stack), Automattic (WooCommerce.com)

  Sep, 2023 - Apr, 20251 year 7 months

  Product engineer on WooCommerce.com, working on discovery, performance, SEO and AI.

  • Co-led the React rebuild of the WooCommerce.com Marketplace and architected its product-card components and interaction tracking. It's still the live marketplace today.

  • Built the AI proxy integration used across WooCommerce.com, so AI features shipped one consistent way with prompt-level control, usage tracking and cost reporting.

  • Shipped an experimental AI product-comparison MVP to help customers choose extensions.

  • Removed 40%+ of plugin-based redirects by writing a CLI tool that moved them to NGINX.

  • Automated syncing and translation of SEO metadata into our in-house translation tool.

  • Planned a shared recommendations setup using Algolia Recommend behind our own API proxy.

• Senior Technical Support Engineer / Project Lead, Automattic (WordPress.com)

  Jan, 2018 - Jan, 20235 years

  Handled escalations for enterprise and VIP customers and led cross-team projects to improve self-service.

  • Fixed complex VIP issues involving custom code, server access and platform-specific problems.

  • Led the build of automated plan-downgrade flows, so customers could do it themselves instead of waiting on support.

  • Named a "Distinguished HE" for customer experience: top 5 of 300+ Happiness Engineers (Automattic's customer support team) in a quarter.

  • Mentored new hires through the buddy programme; helped onboard and keep 4+ colleagues.

  • Ran live customer webinars and kept self-serve courses up to date.

• Technical Director, Illustrate Digital

  Feb, 2014 - Dec, 20173 years 10 months

  • Ran engineering, support and project delivery for a WordPress agency. Hired and led a distributed team, owned client relationships and set technical direction.

  • Moved the team to remote-first working with Slack and Asana, stayed hands-on with development, and was the escalation point for clients.

• Customer Support Manager, Freestart PLC

  Apr, 2013 - Feb, 201410 months

  • Managed a team of 3 customer support staff serving web-hosting clients, reporting to senior leadership. Introduced training that improved resolution times and CSAT.

Projects Experience

• Quiver Café & Liège Waffles, devNel

  - Present

  Astro + Sanity rebuild on Cloudflare Workers for a social-impact café in Cape Town.

  • Both sites fully live; content edited by a non-technical owner in Sanity Studio

  • Online ordering built: Yoco payments and Uber Direct delivery, switched on with a single toggle in Sanity

• WooCommerce.com Marketplace, Automattic

  - Present

  React rebuild of the WooCommerce.com Marketplace; still the live marketplace.

Skills

Education

Volunteer Work