Working as a Software Engineer
DataEQ
I'm currently a principal engineer at DataEQ (formerly BrandsEye), where I've worked since 2012. While I spend most of my time as an IC, I also manage other engineers and I'm part of the leadership team. My main focus is on full-stack web applications and distributed systems.
DataEQ currently focuses on handling "unstructured data" (mostly social media data, but also traditional media and clients' internal data) and highlights information that our clients can act on. We work across use cases ranging from customer support all the way to compliance with legal frameworks, such as South Africa's treating customers fairly legislation.
A main tool of ours is our bespoke crowdsourcing platform that we use to clean and label our data, creating accurate data sets for our clients, our analyst team, and the machine-learning and data-modelling work that we do. Like everyone else, we also make heavy use of LLMs at the moment.
Outside of distributed systems I also enjoy concurrency models, resilience engineering, human-centred system design, and building interactive systems. But I've worked on a lot of things, from building and maintaining k8s clusters, to using Chef, managing replicated databases, designing data schemas, creating and maintaining a range of microservices using Spring Boot, and building parsers for domain-specific languages. I also manage, coach, and mentor other people on the dev team, and handle roadmaps and inter-departmental communication.
We have a lot of data to investigate, and I get to use my visualisation and mathematics / statistics experience from my MSc and PhD days to design and implement our data-visualisation dashboards, and to work on statistical and machine learning problems.
Zamani Project
I also worked for a short time on the Zamani Project, which focused on (and still focuses on — they're still around) the spatial documentation of African cultural heritage sites. If you want to see a sample of some of the data we collected, have a look at my publications. I helped to collect geospatial data using laser scanners, and also to develop software for processing the data.