Mmm…what to say, so many things…get your thoughts aligned….the voices in my head, what can I say!
What do I do currently…well, I’m the Head of Technology Services – Africa for a international mining group in Africa, with offices in Johannesburg, South Africa, with mines in Australia, Africa and South America.
Jokes aside, in short I’m a hooked, passionate, technology nutter. I like tech, specifically anything to do with IT. I have been in this industry since 1988, yes, its a long time! I have used ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64/128’s, 386’s, 486’s and then the climb to the now Intel Core i3,5,7,9’s, AMD’s etc.
Started using DOS when it was released, then Windows, Windows for Workgroups, Novell NetWare, AIX, Suse, RHEL, AIX, CentOS, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, you name it.
I enjoy designing, tinkering, architecting new solutions, hardware or software or a combination of both. Started programming on Cobol, then went to uni/varsity “programming” in Turbo Pascal, then onto Visual Basic 5/6, general web development in PHP, Java Scripting, CSS/HTML and eventually moved over to Python.
Hardware…mmm…well from Networking in terms of switches, firewall (hardware & software), access points, IP Cameras, Storage systems in terms of SAN and NAS’s, the old 1/2/4U server hardware, Dell, IBM & HP (or if you can remember, Compaq!) to HCI based server hardware like the Dell vxRail & VTRX. Then I can’t forget the general IT hardware like printers, scanners, desktops, monitors (Dell/HP/Lenovo and no name brand, self-built systems). So many things to mention…
Software…ok, Office 365, Windows Server OS since its inception, AIX, Linux based OS’s like RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, Debian (my preferred notebook OS is Debian with KDE Plasma on a System76 Lemur Pro notebook), Mint, PopOS!, MS Visio, Projects, there is just too many to mention.
Enterprise monitoring I used and use is, PRTG, Zabbix, IBM’s monitoring tool set, ITM & ITCAM, Syslog / SIEM software like Alert Logic, Manage Engine products, most of them 🙂
Security, that is just a given in IT. Locking down a server or desktop, whether it is Windows/Linux or the like, AV products like Forticlient / Trend, if it’s EDR, MDR or XDR, it was done to the painful degrees it needed to be to ensure my environments are safe and secure as far as possible and practical.
What more, IoT, is my favourite after hours time gobbler, from making my own weather station, Home Assistant home automation, monitoring my Solar System, etc.
I will gladly consult my skills for anything in the above mentioned areas for your business. Since we are in the IT world, most things can be done remotely, over Google Video, MS Teams, Zoom or whatever media you like.
Hobbies you might ask, oh heck yeah, other than eating, breathing and living IT, I really like cooking (yip, I’m a foodie), enjoy a speciality coffee (if you ask me what that is, then we can’t be friends 😉 ), hiking and MTB’ing. I really enjoy nature without killing myself in terms of fitness, but its always good to go outdoors and reset or rethink something that has me going! If you are interested, then click here for my blog on hiking and MTBi’ing.
Other than that, drop me an email here and we can chat.