This page was initially put together for an interview which I did several years ago. It needs to be updated, to include the work which we’ve done for Nedbank, the AmaRadio project, etc, etc, etc.
1996 – Finished school at Stutterheim High School. Stutterheim is a beautiful small town in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
1997 – Worked for the Standard Bank, under their “fast track management” program. My dad was a banker before he started his own business, so I thought a career in banking might be a good idea. It wasn’t what I was looking for, so I left the bank in October and backpacked Australia for 3 months.
1998 – Attempted university. Started off studying English (always wanted to be an English teacher). Quickly realized that studying English was nothing like Dead Poets Society, so I switched to accounting. That lasted about 6 weeks, until I realised I’d rather do almost anything than be an accountant. In the interim, I had started working in the evenings for a local college, keeping their network up and running, and lecturing short courses in basic computer skills. They offered me a full time position lecturing more advanced courses (including programming), so I dropped out of university and did that. By the end of the year was running the college’s IT department, and was making good money. Much more fun than university. No regrets.
1999 – Continued lecturing, and also opened my first business, a video shop! Learnt a huge amount about myself during this process, including that nothing is as satisfying as running my own business. Eventually I tried to expand by doing a deal with Mr Video, who promptly opened their own shop across the road from mine and put me out of business. Again, learnt a huge amount about myself, and business, because of this experience.
For a number of reasons, I decided it was time for a change, so I moved to Cape Town. My first job was with HBVO, looking after their network and developing custom software for various internal business processes. Towards the end of this year HBVO sent me to London for 3 months to build systems for their “parent company”, Mustard Catering. During this project I met Chris Laurie. Chris was a business guru who used to consult for HBVO, who also happened to be a Clarion programmer. Chris persuaded me to leave Visual Studio, and use Clarion for the Mustard project, which I did. This was possibly my best career decision to date. After the project I left HBVO and went to work for Chris instead, keeping HBVO and Mustard as two of our major clients.
2000 – Chris Laurie was a huge influence on my Clarion career. He is amazingly gifted at understanding people and business, and at designing software solutions for virtually any business environment. He is also a heck of a musician, and taught me how real men drink coffee (strong, filtered, and in vast quantities). We worked in the same office and he regularly spent time explaining concepts to me on his fold-out whiteboards. While with Acron (Chris’ company) I worked on numerous projects, and I now look back on that time very fondly.
As a Clarion developer, it didn’t take long before I heard about CapeSoft, and Bruce Johnson. CapeSoft is the world leader at developing Clarion components (generic code), bar none, and Bruce is the legend who heads up CapeSoft. I remember how excited I was when I learned that CapeSoft was based in Cape Town, and attended my first Clarion User Group meetings at their offices. I knew immediately that my new target was to one day work for CapeSoft. The best of the best.
It happened sooner than I imagined. Later that year a position opened at CapeSoft. Apparently over 30 developers applied for the position. For the final interview I was given a laptop, a copy of Clarion, and a number of programming challenges. It was awesome. I got the job, and started working for CapeSoft the following month.
Leaving Acron was a tough decision. I felt like Chris had put so much effort into me, and I loved working on projects with him. But I think we both saw that an opportunity to work for CapeSoft was something I couldn’t turn down.
2001 – I joined CapeSoft as Vincent Friday was leaving, and I took over the development of Faswin as my first project. Faswin had some big clients, including the Southern Sun group. I did a fair amount of work for Southern Sun, including some custom projects at their head office in Joburg. I also started working on File Explorer, which was the first Clarion template that I ever developed. Andrew Ireland (who used to develop the actual Clarion language, and who is widely regarded as the top technical Clarion programmer on the planet) had built a COM engine for Clarion, which CapeSoft licensed, so File Explorer was built on top of Andy’s classes. Because of this I got to work closely with Andy while I was at CapeSoft, and learnt a massive amount from him. I would say that Andy was the single biggest influence on my technical ability as a programmer. He is an absolute legend, and his genius continues to blow my mind.
Andy would spend a week building something (usually after hours, for fun), and then send it to me. No notes, no comments, no explanation. Sometimes just a paragraph in an email that I could almost grasp. Then I’d go through his code, line by line, and painstakingly figure out what he had done, how it worked, and how it could be simplified for general consumption.
I think Andy possibly thought I was brighter than I am, but in hindsight it was having to struggle like this that probably benefited me the most. Lots of development companies today use the catch phrase “code is poetry”. Andy is the only developer I’ve ever met where this is actually the case. Only super-geeks will appreciate this, but Andy’s code is that stunning.
Looking back, I feel like university was never going to teach me what I needed. Instead, my own teenage years (messing around on Commodore 64′s, 386′s, early Apples, Pascal, GW Basics, VB, etc) were my “school years”. And Chris, Bruce, and Andy were my degree. I firmly believe that I couldn’t have obtained a better education anywhere. I feel truly privileged to have “studied under” these three men.
2002 – In May 2003 I went with Bruce to ETC III in Gatlinburg, USA. This was my first Clarion conference, and I got to meet many of the “big names” in Clarion. Andy Ireland was one of the speakers, as was Bruce. In fact, I was the first CapeSoft staff member to ever attend a conference with Bruce! ETC was incredibly special. Probably the most enjoyable conference I have ever attended. In September 2002 I released Office Inside, my second Clarion accessory. I also developed CapeSoft Mailer in 2002, which started off as an internal tool at CapeSoft, and later on was released publicly.
2004 -September was Devcon! Devcon is THE premier Clarion conference. This year it took place at Disney World, Florida, and I was invited to speak! This was incredible. I spoke on Clarion’s XML implementation, and I got to hang out with Robert Zaunere (CEO of SoftVelocity), his wife Kelly, Bob Foreman, Diego, and the other SoftVelocity staff. Working for CapeSoft certainly had its perks! As far as I know, I’m the youngest person to ever speak at Devcon. Pretty cool. 2004 was also the year that I developed J-Flow, my first Clarion accessory for a private client. I did this with CapeSoft’s permission. Bruce and Derek were incredible bosses. I think it was the end of 2004 that Lesley and I re-built ClarionShop.
2005 – This was my last year with CapeSoft, marking the end of my 5 year career with them. This has been the longest (by far) that I have worked for a company, and was without a doubt the experience that “set me up” to start my own business. Not only did I get to work under Bruce, and alongside developers like Andy Ireland, Jim Kane, and other legends in the industry, but I also worked on code that was used by thousands of other developers, and which ultimately ended up in software used by hundreds of thousands of users. Some of the code from my CapeSoft days is being used by Southern Sun, Spar, various banks, various government agencies, the US military, the Canadian Airforce, numerous universities, and even by NASA! CapeSoft was a phenomenal company to “grow up” in.
2006 – I left CapeSoft in January to concentrate full-time on StrategyOnline.
The journey continues..
