The person behind the builds
Pretoria, South Africa. Building websites and online stores for real businesses, backed by AWS certifications and production cloud experience most web developers don't have. I believe the only honest way to learn infrastructure is to run it, so every site is built to hold up, not just to launch.
Chapter one
UNISA is a distance learning university. No campus, no lectures. Just a syllabus and the expectation that you figure it out. Most people who enrol while working full-time drop out within two semesters.
The ones who stay develop something a classroom cannot teach: learning under pressure, without anyone checking in. That discipline is the foundation of everything that followed.
While working through the BSc Computing degree, real experience was happening in parallel. At Westerwick Tech, working alongside senior cloud architects on production AWS environments. VPC subnets stopped being diagrams and became decisions with consequences. IAM policies stopped being exercises and became the difference between a secure system and a 3am incident.
Chapter two
Every cloud engineer reaches a realisation, usually mid-incident, that infrastructure is not about servers. It is about systems that work when you are not watching. Systems that fail gracefully and recover automatically.
That shift happened in the field: owning IAM audit cycles across multiple AWS accounts, writing Bash scripts that turned hour-long tasks into five-minute automations, sitting in post-mortems and tracing failures back to assumptions that seemed reasonable at 2pm and catastrophic at 2am.
Chapter three
In January 2025, the decision was made to go freelance: building websites and online stores for real businesses. You are the designer, the developer, the security reviewer, and the person who picks up the phone when something breaks. There is no senior colleague to defer to.
The first client sites went live for real businesses with real customers: a WooCommerce store handling live orders from day one, a dealer site where checkout and order management had to just work, a rebuild that fixed every pain point in someone’s outgrown platform. One of those early clients was Westerwick, the same company where the AWS fundamentals were first learned on the job, now a client whose site runs on that same discipline.
That pressure turned out to be the best teacher available. Every site is backed by production AWS thinking: CloudFront distribution, Route 53 routing, ACM-managed certificates, IAM scoped to exactly what’s needed and nothing more. It has to work. Real users. Real traffic.
What came out of that period was a set of principles: secure by default, deployable by code, recoverable by design. Three rules that now govern every build, from a five-page business site to a full online store.
“The most honest thing an engineer can do is build something real, put it in production, and see what happens.”
a conviction earned, not borrowed
The timeline
2022
Cloud & Systems Support Engineer
Westerwick Tech Innovation · Pretoria
First real exposure to production AWS. Working alongside senior architects under live SLA obligations. IAM audit cycles, VPC design, incident response, post-mortems. The kind of experience money cannot buy.
2024
AWS Associate Certifications
SAA-C03 · DVA-C02 · Credly Verified
Formalised years of hands-on experience with dual AWS Associate certifications. Validated against the backdrop of real systems already running in production.
2025
Freelance Web, E-Commerce & Cloud Developer
Independent · Remote
Went out alone. Full-cycle delivery for real clients: discovery, design, build, security review, documentation, handover. Websites and stores shipped and running in production for real traffic, backed by the same AWS discipline used for cloud infrastructure: environments from scratch in under 15 minutes, zero standing credentials.
Now
CKA · AWS DEA-C01 · BSc Computing
In progress · UNISA 2027
Expanding into data engineering and container orchestration. BSc Computing at UNISA continues, slower than a full-time degree and more durable than a bootcamp. The work does not stop while the studying happens.
Credentials
Certification
VerifiedCertification
VerifiedCertification
Verified
In Progress
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Actively Pursuing
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01)
Credly Skills Wallet
How I Build
Not just a website builder: the same production discipline used for AWS infrastructure, applied to every business site and store.
Built to Stay Up
Your site or store is built on the same fault-tolerant AWS foundations used for production infrastructure, secure by default, not bolted on after launch.
Hover to reveal outcome
Delivery Outcome
Multi-AZ deployments and least-privilege access as standard, so a single point of failure never means your business goes dark.
Fast, Repeatable Launches
Every environment is built from code, not clicked together by hand, so what works in testing is exactly what goes live, every time.
Hover to reveal outcome
Delivery Outcome
Full environments provisioned from scratch in under 15 minutes, version-controlled, so nothing gets lost between revisions.
Recovers When Things Go Wrong
If something breaks, it's designed to recover on its own, not wait for a 3am phone call.
Hover to reveal outcome
Delivery Outcome
Automated failover and a documented runbook for every build, so a problem is a blip, not a multi-hour outage.
Methodology
From discovery to operations, each phase is engineered for reliability, security, and speed.
Translate business goals into cloud boundaries, data flow, and service responsibilities before deployment begins.
Implement least-privilege IAM, segmented networking, and encrypted data paths through IaC-driven environments.
Enable deterministic provisioning and release workflows with Terraform modules and deployment pipelines.
Ship runbooks, monitoring, and recovery patterns that keep systems resilient while traffic and complexity increase.
Background
Freelance Cloud Engineer
Jan 2025 – Present
Independent · Pretoria, SA
Cloud & Systems Support Engineer
2022 – 2024
Westerwick Tech Innovation Pvt Ltd · Pretoria, SA
BSc Computing
University of South Africa (UNISA)
Expected Completion: 2027
What I believe
01
Secure by Default
IAM least-privilege from day one. VPC segmentation before a single instance is running. No long-lived credentials. Security is the first architectural decision, not something added at the end.
02
Deployable by Code
Every environment is a Terraform plan. Version-controlled and rebuildable in under 15 minutes. If you cannot destroy and recreate your infrastructure from a single command, you do not fully understand it.
03
Recoverable by Design
Multi-AZ by default. Automated failover, not manual. Runbooks written for someone who has never seen the system before. Reliability is designed in. It cannot be retrofitted.
Beyond the CV
🌍
South African tech, global ambitions
Building a tech career from Pretoria means competing on a global stage from day one. No Silicon Valley safety net. Credibility comes from what you ship, not where you are. That keeps the bar honest.
📚
Learning as a lifestyle
UNISA taught something more valuable than any module: how to learn without structure and without anyone checking in. AWS re:Invent talks at midnight. Architecture whitepapers over coffee. The cloud space moves fast enough that continuous learning is not optional.
🏗️
I build to understand
Every project on this site is live. Not a demo, not a localhost screenshot. Actual AWS infrastructure serving real traffic. The gap between understanding a concept and having it running in production is where the real learning happens.
☕
Off the clock
Pretoria has spectacular sunsets. When the laptop closes, there is music with eclectic taste, conversations that make you rethink things you were certain about, and the occasional argument about whether an architecture decision was actually as clever as it seemed.
Looking forward
The Certified Kubernetes Administrator is in progress. Not because Kubernetes is a trend, but because container orchestration is the layer between code and cloud that everything depends on. I want to understand it well enough to debug it, not just deploy it.
The AWS Data Engineer certification is next. Data engineering and cloud infrastructure are converging. The best cloud architects understand pipelines, and the best data engineers understand the infrastructure those pipelines run on.
Longer term: problems that require both depth and breadth. Enterprise architecture. Systems that serve millions. Work that makes you think harder than you expected to.
Currently
Let's build something
worth running in production.
Cloud architecture, infrastructure design, or just a conversation about systems.
