Gerrie Swart Email & Phone Number

Waterloo, On

Johannesburg

Flickswitch (www.flickswitch.co.za) is a South-African bred IoT / M2M and telemetry company that specialises in SIM management in South Africa, Namibia, and Kenya. I am one of the original four founding members.As a co-founder, I fulfilled technical, strategic, and managerial roles. I had strong technical involvement in all aspects of Flickswitch's software development life-cycle; from the pioneering stage, through leading the design and architecting, to development.Because of the bootstrapped nature of Flickswitch and the small team size I could (generally) avoid the Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) by mostly staying with my first loves: creating products and programming.I architected and implemented the core systems of Flickswitch -- small to medium-scale, high-uptime & high performance concurrent systems that process millions of real-time daily transactions.I was responsible for two direct senior technical reports who were each running multiple projects within Flickswitch.I re-engineered multiple systems for fast scaling and growth (long history of rapid growth at Flickswitch) as part of our international roll-out.Tech skills:At Flickswitch I worked with combination of Ubuntu Linux, Percona (a MySQL variant) with Vagrant and Docker for virtualisation.Development was mainly done in Java, Python, and modern PHP (I particularly like Laravel).To support this we used Git and Mercurial for revision control, JUnit and PHPUnit for unit testing, Codeception and Laravel's HTTP tests for functional (a.k.a. acceptance) testing, Cucumber, Behat, and PHPSpec for (limited) behaviour-driven development. Laravel Dusk is superb for browser testing. My experience with the SPA side of things (Angular, Vue and the like) is quite limited, but I'd like to improve it.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

Smartcall (www.smartcall.co.za) is a leading South African WASP (Wireless Application Service Provider) servicing more than 8 million customers.I re-architected and re-built an initial POC USSD server that handled Smartcall’s extensive USSD service offering.I improved Smartcall’s existing ISO 8583 (Financial transaction card originated messages) server (used to vend prepaid airtime to SIM cards) taking it from a many crashes per day to long-term stability, while increasing throughput and avoiding the "complete rewrite" fallacy.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

Infomet (www.infomet.com) is a 30+ year old consulting firm with a strong methodology focus operating in Luxembourg, Netherlands, South Africa and Australia. I contracted through them at Absa Bank’s Regulatory Reporting division.I mainly built a customisable reporting engine that rendered the Currency Risk, Market (Position) Risk, Interest-Rate Risk, Liquidity Risk, Minimum Reserve Balance and Minimum Liquid Assets, and Capital Adequacy reports in various formats (from HTML to a custom South African Reserve Bank format.)