Creative Technology Outlaw (CTO)
A solution architect with an entrepreneurial spirit: blending design, business, and technology to solve problems and transform ideas into reality.
About Me
Hi there! I’m a software developer with a decade of experience building websites and applications for my own start-ups, and I’ve recently completed a Master’s in Entrepreneurship.
Working on my own start-ups has given me extensive experience with all aspects of building a business, including taking ownership of many parts of the tech stack. I’m very comfortable working with both web technology and backend development.
On the flip side of this entrepreneurial coin, my master’s degree has provided me with a deep understanding of the challenges companies face in building better products, finding product-market fit, talking to customers, and prioritizing features.
What Is a Solutions Architect?
Solution Architects are wizards that blend aesthetic sensibility with technical skills, allowing them to understand a problem: then design, build, and implement a solution autonomously.
As a Solutions Architect, I can be found designing, planning, and constructing websites from a high level, playing a crucial role in bridging the gap between business requirements and technical implementation. From design to user experience — all the way through to software engineering and constructing elegant information hierarchies.
Working at the intersection of design, business and technology: Solutions Architects need to be experts in both areas. More importantly, they must understand the limits and possibilities of their medium, enabling them to create user-friendly designs for the web while understanding the big picture of the problem and business opportunity.
Why it's Invaluable
Designers are the visionaries that love to create awe-inspiring, futuristic interfaces filled with Pixar-like animations and impossible dreams. A Solutions Architect plays a crucial role in bringing these visions to life, transforming them into practical and functional digital solutions.
A Solutions Architect ensures that these digital designs are not only user-friendly but also technically sound. They take into account critical aspects of the build process, such as project timelines, resource allocation, page-load times, browser compatibility, progressive enhancement, maintainability, and overall complexity. By bridging the gap between design and implementation, a Solutions Architect ensures that the final product is both aesthetically pleasing and technically robust.
We recognize that even the most
Our experience gives us strong intuition into which designs should work well in the digital domain; what unknown pitfalls and functional flaws we might encounter; and what the user experience of the designs would be.
From Concept to Completion
Whether we start with a design from drawings and sketches, or refine existing processes, we recognize that the first iteration is rarely the final answer. It's through iteration and sharing that we achieve the best outcome for everyone.
All good designs start with a sketch, it's much easier to iterate and explore on paper first. 
The very first alpha version that I shared with the team to start getting feedback.How embarrassing... but much easier to share ideas and communicate when you have something tangible to play with.
The next version took some inspiration from the TailwindUI Transmit theme, and included the audio player. 
The next version refined the design even more, removing the vertical icon column on the left, adjusting the breakpoints a bit to bring back our third column and cleaning up the sidebar and UI a bit more. 
The last iteration included a simplified sidebar navigation after some reflection on the SEO and information architecture. 
The simplified layout (with a minimized sidebar) makes for a very zen and clean reading experience. Sitting at the intersection of many departments in a multi-disciplinary role, we are excellent collaborators and communicators. This communication extends deeply into both domains and we have the language and knowledge to delve deeply into either design related or technical issues.
We are able to see the big picture and cut through the complexity of both domains, to shape the product, and create beautiful and elegant solutions.
Understanding the Medium
Sure, sparkly designs and flashy animations catch the eye, but the true magic happens when you consider how these elements come to life across various devices. How does a website transform on mobile screens, tablets or ultra-wide monitors? And what happens when we switch to dark-mode on e-ink tablets or need to print a page?
Design often meets its real test after leaving the drawing board, especially when adapting for multilingual support. What happens when the design tries to accommodate right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew. What about Chinese too? Or when your German translator tells you that privacy policy is "Datenschutz-Bestimmungen" and your footer was only designed for max-w-64.
A default English page for our L/L Research website. 
In Arabic, we had to horizontally flip the entire website... how confusing for slide-overs when they start coming from the opposite side. However, also a nice way to get some fresh eyes on your design after looking at it for too long.This is the same page as the previous slide, just translated.
One big feature we wanted to ship on the redesign was the ability to read translations side-by-side.Here you can see the layout adjusts accordingly and even the paragraphs automatically shift down to line up with the original.
Here you can see what the default entry page looks like for English content. 
And here's the Arabic version as a comparison.I find the three column layout really suits multilingual designs that need to support many right-to-left languages.
These insights and considerations are born from hands on experience. They guide us crafting designs that are not only visually appealing but are also functional, accessible, inclusive and responsive.
Some Previous Work
One of my projects in collaboration with L/L Research has been a trying to launch a meditation platform (based on their philosophy) with a lifetime license business model.This site is built with Laravel, Inertia, React and LemonSqueezy for billing.
Thanks to OpenAI DALL·E for the nice images! 
The current homepage for L/L Research, not my best work... but the website is over 6000 pages and a huge part of the work was actually converting old archived content into markdown.I wrote a bunch of custom CommonMark plugins that work really well with transcriptions: so we can have different speakers, inline notes, editor notes, inaudible words, etc.
We've learned a lot since this website was launched, which has informed the design decisions in the redesign, and the team trusts me a lot more now to give me creative freedom to make some decisions on my own.
My dad helped start this Gaelic football team in South Africa and it's doing really well internationally. I helped build a quick Tailwind site for them. 
One of my previous startup ideas: a search engine for cosmetics and medicine so you can quickly look up if your pain-killers or pills have lactose or other strange ingredients in them. This one is a slow burner. 
A project I built during the pandemic, this is a risk dashboard I created for the German government to help fashion companies in Germany identify where their supplies come from.This was to help them remove risks in their supply chain, and our tool would identify things like slavery, child labour, dangerous chemical usage, water waste, etc.
It's not pretty but I'm really proud of this one... plus building the UI for this one was really complex. Pushing Redux to the limit.
My original startup, Sendtao.I don't have many screenshots but this was a dashboard showing sites around the country, and engineers would send health & safety form daily and we would generate and email some PDF files to the management team to help them keep track of issues.
A few startups and side-projects I've worked on over the last few years, with each project I learn more and more about what makes a project successful and improve the quality of my work.
In my work I value and appreciate simplicity in all aspects: minimizing complexity and scope, reducing cognitive load for users, immutablity in deployments and data, and creating solutions that are easy to maintain over time.
Reach out to me if you’re interested in chatting about any current or future opportunities and how I may be able to help.