💻 Dylan Harbour Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

At Ringier SA, we build the technology that powers online Marketplaces. This includes our primary platform products in Jobs, Property, and General Classified marketplaces as well as specialized tools and services that empower Tech/Operations/Sales teams to deliver on their mandate in the wider online media industry. Our online solutions handle in excess of 50 Billion Requests per year, all fully developed in-house with our favorite go-to tools. This includes the TALL stack for primary platforms (Tailwind Alpine Laravel Livewire) as well as VueJS, InertiaJS, .NET Core, GoLang, ReactJS, and Python for a bunch of specialized services. We're fully embedded in the AWS cloud (through Terraformed infra), making use of as many of the AWS specialized services as necessary to deliver scalable, modern solutions.My role as Technology Director includes oversight of our tech stack and the teams of developers who build on that Technology. This includes * Setting and communicating the technical vision for our organization* Oversight and accountability for the delivery of projects & the security of our solutions* Team & People management. Empowering autonomy, accountability, and delivery while striving to increase developer happiness. * Leading technical due diligence and planning on future projects and partnerships. * Collaboration with our international Ringier family through Ringier AG. * Usually Hiring!

Cape Town Area, South Africa

RingierSA builds online Marketplaces. Jobs, Cars, Property, Horizontal (General Classifieds) and Meta/Aggregators. Our solution is called "CUBE". We don't just build the basics but focus on adding value to our clients, with almost half of the engineering team involved in back-end teams working on things like Personalisation/Recommendations, Advanced Commerce Modelling/Support and dedicated, re-usable Microservices and tooling. The "heart" of the organisation, is our vertical teams. Supporting millions of users every day across three continents to make their biggest life decisions as they buy a new House / Car or find a new Career. Our primary application stack is Laravel PHP Driven, with VueJS & TailwindCSS supporting. We are long term committed to the AWS cloud, and make extensive use of products like ECS Fargate, RDS Aurora, S3, Lambdas, Elasticache, Elasticsearch, KMS all provisioned via Terraform and protected with Cloudflare. My role is to oversee all Vertical Engineering teams, as well as a large section of our Backend teams. Focussed on everything from overall Technical direction, Skills development, New Hires and Uptime monitoring/accountability. While a significant amount of my time and energy is invested in the admin and people that make the above happen; I still find time to get my hands dirty in code, especially with new technologies and while evaluating potential changes in our stack.

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

After receiving great feedback for an in-house tool we built to support the group on their Core Web Vitals journey, we've decided to open it up to the rest of the world as a stand-along SaaS product. WebVitalize was built to make sense of Core Web Vitals scores and reduce the developer frustrations in trying to keep track of them across multiple sites. Instead of just following generic RUM, Lighthouse or CrUX API approaches, we combined the best bits of all of the above and wrapped it into a UI and tool-set that makes sense to Developers and SEO practitioners. Instead of waiting 28 days for the full impact of a change to be visible, we're now able to see the impact of a change within 8 minutes, and above 95% accuracy in predicting the 28 day score! 💪https://www.webvitalize.io/

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

I left the Jobs team at ROAM to start a new team called "Group Engineering" Our mandate was to reduce the duplication of effort between teams and design the next iteration of what our tech landscape would look like. Over the course of 2019, we managed to launch a new POC marketplace in Vietnam with newly imagined infrastructure, additional micro-services and updates to our stack and processes. Our infra upgrades focussed on Infra-as-Code driven by Terraform, Docker + ECS (Fargate), and more modern security implementations. We experimented with a new VueJS + TailwindCSS powered Frontend, and simpler API and backend implementations. I fully embraced the ownership of a team, mentoring and managing people while still being accountable for the delivery end goal.

Cape Town

ROAM owns and runs some of the biggest online marketplaces on the continent. We specialized in building the platforms for these marketplaces across the Jobs, Auto, Property and General Classified categories. Millions of Users, Millions of Listings, Millions of Page requests. This role taught me the meaning of High Availability / High Scalability and tightened up my experience of working with bigger teams and following more modern standardsI joined as a Senior PHP Developer on the Jobs team, focussed on extending the Laravel PHP platform for our East and West African jobs businesses. We were fully committed to AWS cloud, and made extensive us of Ec2, Load balancers, SQS, RDS, ElastiCache and many other usual AWS suspects.

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

I spent about 5 years fully self-employed, together with my wife. We built bespoke tooling and projects for our own use and ventured deep down the rabbit hole of Social Media Content Creation, Photography, and custom Web & Systems Development. Our Content Creation business (@GoodContentGram) & Photography (@ladandlassphotography) are still going strong under my wife's direction. During this time, I invested heavily in growing my Personal Web Development skillset, and learnt the in's and out's of running a business. I returned to full-time employment after being convinced to join the ROAM team.

City Of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

My work at M2North revolved around the integration and distribution of business documents (Purchase Orders, Invoices, Statements, Sales Orders, Advanced Shipping Notices, etc). We acted as a translator/switch between businesses and their trading partners by maintaining and extending an in-house PHP-powered system. We were able to translate any system's format to any other systems format, technically "unblocking" automated business processes and allowing them to *just work*I gained valuable experience in a wide range of industries: Petrochemical, FMCG, Logistics, Mining, and Agriculture to name a few. This was spread over a variety of partner systems, including SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle, and custom ERP systems Seeing firsthand how technology could empower businesses to move faster significantly molded the way I think about Solutions Architecture and the impact we can have from the Engineering room. I spent much of the later years at M2North involved in the Customer Success and Solutions design with our clients, often supporting Business Analysts in crafting solutions. We were one of the first companies in the country to embrace the recently announced (at the time!) Amazon Cloud which proved how we were pushing the boundaries of where most industries were at.

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Computer Science

Completed 2nd-year Computer Science Subjects.

Matric

Computer Science & Geography Distinction.