As a Principal Software engineer, my responsibility is to define the future architecture and ensure that our teams can successfully execute the plan to put that architecture in place.As a tech leader, I think further ahead so that we understand the architectural challenges and buildout process for upcoming work. I help create and socialize the patterns and practices that guide our engineering teams as well as define the future architecture of the many systems we build and maintain.A portion of my time is spent coordinating discussions between multiple teams as we gather information to guide our architectural decisions.A portion of my time is spent on "research and development" (R&D) as I'm continuously watching the market trends in, amongst other topics: big data, data analytics and machine learning. As part of the research process, I often spike solutions and document the process so that the teams can follow through if we choose to.Another portion of my time is spent supporting the development teams by helping them plan out the details of their upcoming work, and working through some of the pitfalls.I am often needed to resolve production issues or support teams that are blocked by technical challenges that they need some guidance on.

In January 2016, Toolbox Solutions was acquired by SPS Commerce.During the transition, my role changed to that of a Development Manager.During this transition, I led the cloud migration project and brought all of our solutions into the Amazon Cloud. This allowed us to terminate our agreement with the data centre and modernize our infrastructure stack.

A leader on a truly world class team of software engineers, I push others to learn, innovate, to follow, and ultimately lead themselves and other.I define best practices and am a champion of code quality, knowledge sharing and clear communication.I believe in leading by example, and as a duty, remain on the forefront of innovation relevant to current and future needs of the organisation.To ensure we can accommodate the ever increasing data volumes and increasing complexity of analytic, I work hard to stay informed on market trends and new competitive or complementary tool sets.As the Data Architect, I'm ultimately responsible for everything data related in the organisation. I lead the design and guide the implementation from staging systems to ETL processes to Data warehouses and Data marts for each of the company's clients.

In my role as managing partner, I wore a couple of hats.My primary role was always to make sure we deliver the software solutions our customers needed, in-time and accurately.As a "Business Intelligence Architect", as I moved the organization from our in-house OLAP solution to a more robust and scalable Microsoft OLAP solution.This allowed us to process substantially more data and return analysis much faster. This change very quickly opened the opportunity to take on more contracts and expand into different areas of the "Banking" business.As a Managing Partner, I managed customer contract negations and invoicing for all of our contracts and teams. I also managed the hiring and support of new staff members as they start their journey with us.By the end of 2010, I trained up technical leaders to take over the day-to-day management of the 3 development teams I was responsible for. I turned my attention to leading our leaders.I retained my interests in the company as I weaned my responsibilities and ultimately stepped out in November 2013.

I started this role as an infrastructure support specialist and used my knowledge of "Relational Database Administration" to manage a small cluster of Oracle database servers running on Linux, as well as the Microsoft network infrastructure that supported our day-to-day operationsAs I matured in this role, I transitioned to be more data focussed as I helped build out a process that managed the corporate data warehouse for our customer "Absa Bank". This role catapulted me into the "Data Warehousing" world, and I learned and honed skills in ETL development and large dataset processing whilst deepening my knowledge and experience in tuning "Relational Database Systems" for best performance on warehouse workloads.

At the time, as the youngest ever "Microsoft Certified Technical Trainer", I regularly taught classes such as Microsoft SQL Server Administration, Network Essentials and A++ to industry professionals.In addition to teaching, I was responsible for classroom setups and would ensure that all classrooms have computers and networks correctly setup and ready for the day's classes. I automated the classroom setup process by introducing "Image-casting" software and building up a library of machine images for specific courses. This automation allowed us to expand the number of classes we were able to manage across 2 training sites without the need for dedicated technical staff to run classroom setups. This automation process taught me that you can automate the things that are repetitive to allow yourself time to focus on more important work.In my role as a trainer, I learned how to lead conversations and guide the learning process of groups of technical experts. I learned that I have a passion for facilitating learning.