Director/Founder
Featherlight Consulting
(Internet and Information Technology, < 10 employees)
Keywords
Skills
Over 15 years of experience in the industry, with expertise ranging from networking through systems, both self-hosted and cloud-native. Self-directed autodidact, with strong leadership experience in multiple environments (both customer facing and internal). Operator of a boutique consulting practice since 2015 - often engaging directly with primary stakeholders to learn their desired outcome, structuring the work plan to achieve that, and then working towards that goal - in roles from individual contributor to "drop-in and get running" team lead on their team.
Technical experience covers all major modern languages and platforms, with deep operational knowledge and fair-to-extensive knowledge for most others. List of common typicals follows below.
About me as a person: I have a strong drive to building performant and reliable things, be that teams or software. In my leadership roles I also often teach, as upskilling those around me is a win for all. In addition to the technical expertise listed below, I also have a good understanding of the business domain requirements and regularly draw on this to better align expectations and outcomes as needed.
Operational/SRE tooling: github, terraform, jenkins, saltstack, gitlab, mercurial, ansible, kubernetes/k8s (incl. helm, rancher, more), travis, others (incl. e.g. self-hosted Atlassian stacks)
Languages:
Technical experience covers all major modern languages and platforms, with deep operational knowledge and fair-to-extensive knowledge for most others. List of common typicals follows below.
About me as a person: I have a strong drive to building performant and reliable things, be that teams or software. In my leadership roles I also often teach, as upskilling those around me is a win for all. In addition to the technical expertise listed below, I also have a good understanding of the business domain requirements and regularly draw on this to better align expectations and outcomes as needed.
Operational/SRE tooling: github, terraform, jenkins, saltstack, gitlab, mercurial, ansible, kubernetes/k8s (incl. helm, rancher, more), travis, others (incl. e.g. self-hosted Atlassian stacks)
Languages:
- Python (both 2, 3; over 10y experience)
- Go (ops, perf, CI/CD, can patch problems)
- NodeJS/Javascript (backend focus - not frontend)
- Java (ops, but can also read/write if needed)
- others (can write C, etc)
- AWS user since ~2008; familiar with most primary services (EC2, EKS, Route53, SNS, SQS, IAM, custom VPC configs w/ peering, transcode services, S3+Cloudfront), have used many others
- GCP user since ~2015; comfortable working with the service although most clients have been AWS
- Azure/DigitalOcean/others: have used most, can achieve goals
Project history
05/2015
-
06/2021
Boutique consultancy focusing on delivering value to both early-stage startups as well as more established organisations, covering technical, social, and business aspects.
Working with early-stage startup companies, focus on sustainable first-delivery customer-facing MVP of ideas in the proof of concept stage, team and leadership guidance as well as general mentoring. Strong background in understanding the business needs of the delivery, guided by strong communication with the final customer/consumer side of the project to elicit appropriate requirements and to adjust priorities on the delivery accordingly.
In working with more established companies, focuses in: implementation and improvement of observability systems, work in performance engineering, cost optimisation projects, systems scaling (application and database level), unblocking on legacy technical debt, and advisory roles to senior leadership (both technical and process guidance)
Working with early-stage startup companies, focus on sustainable first-delivery customer-facing MVP of ideas in the proof of concept stage, team and leadership guidance as well as general mentoring. Strong background in understanding the business needs of the delivery, guided by strong communication with the final customer/consumer side of the project to elicit appropriate requirements and to adjust priorities on the delivery accordingly.
In working with more established companies, focuses in: implementation and improvement of observability systems, work in performance engineering, cost optimisation projects, systems scaling (application and database level), unblocking on legacy technical debt, and advisory roles to senior leadership (both technical and process guidance)
Local Availability
Only available in these countries:
South Africa
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Travel: Yes
Timezone: UTC+2
Travel: Yes
Timezone: UTC+2
