About me

I'm a founder and developer based in Alberta, Canada. I build software products in regulated spaces — healthcare billing, financial compliance, media audit — mostly as the sole technical person, with collaborators on the domain and business side.

The way I work is probably the most interesting thing about me right now. I've spent the last year building a development methodology around AI-assisted coding that takes governance seriously. Not “vibe coding” — structured, reproducible, auditable development where AI is a power tool under discipline, not a replacement for thinking.

I didn't come to this from a pure software background. I spent thirteen years in IT governance and cybersecurity, and that shapes everything about how I build.

The short version of the CV

I started at PwC in IT audit and risk advisory, then spent eleven years at the Bidvest Group. At Group level I was one of only four or five IT internal auditors in the entire conglomerate. That's where the big project work happened — things like designing a Group-wide cybersecurity audit strategy from scratch (including getting executive buy-in and reporting to board-level Audit and Risk committees), and inventing an interface maturity model for Bidvest Bank because no existing methodology covered what we needed. I'm used to building frameworks where none exist.

From there I moved into the National IT Governance and Cybersecurity Manager role at Bidvest Data — essentially the CISO, for a division that handles secure communications and transactional data for major corporates. I built their entire infosec programme from scratch.

I hold a BCom with Honours in Information Systems from the University of the Witwatersrand, and I'm CISA-certified.

In 2023 my wife and I emigrated to Canada. I'd already been running SigOct Consultants (cybersecurity for small businesses) alongside the Bidvest role, and after the move I went fully independent — which is where the product-building started.

What I'm building now

Meritum— self-serve medical billing for Alberta physicians. The billing system here is genuinely complex (anesthesia calculations, reciprocal billing, multi-procedure bundling) and the existing options either charge premium rates for that complexity or just don't handle it. We're building for the physicians who are currently underserved.

Media Audit Group— a compliance audit tool for CFOs (and CMOs) who need to know where their digital advertising money is actually going. I designed the entire 31-metric assessment methodology from scratch. I'm one of four founding partners, spread across Canada, the UK, and South Africa.

Clear Briefing — an AI-powered intelligence platform for PR firms and industry professionals. It monitors news and newsletter sources, clusters related content, and produces cross-source synthesised briefings. No more reading five overlapping newsletters every morning.

On using AI

I use AI extensively in my development work and I'm transparent about that. I've designed an entire infrastructure around it — self-hosted git with CI enforcement, containerised dev environments, governance hooks, automated testing gates, shared knowledge systems across projects.

I'm also genuinely uncertain about parts of it. The questions about where LLM training data comes from aren't trivial, and I don't think the ethics are resolved. I use the tools seriously whilst taking the criticism seriously. That tension is something I think about a lot, and I write about it here.

What I do know is that AI doesn't self-organise. It doesn't decide what to build, or how to govern itself, or which market to enter. The architecture, the judgment, the decisions about what matters — that's still human work. If anything, AI lets me focus on what I've always been best at: designing frameworks and methodologies. That's the thread through my whole career — the Bidvest Bank interface model, the Group cybersecurity strategy, the MAG assessment methodology, this development system. I think the interesting question isn't “should we use AI” but “how do we use it without abandoning the discipline that makes software trustworthy.”

The personal bit

I'm South African, living in rural Alberta with my wife. I'm neurodivergent (ADHD), which has shaped a lot of how I work — heavy automation, systems that don't depend on me remembering to do things, structured processes that remove initiation barriers. The methodology isn't just about governance. It's about making sustained output possible for a brain that doesn't do “just sit down and work on it” reliably.

I'm also quite shy about self-promotion (the irony of this page is not lost on me). But I believe the work should be visible, so here it is.

This site used to be a personal blog about DIY projects and life in Canada. I've archived those posts, but if you ever want to know how I turned my garage into a golf simulator or built out a spare bedroom from bare studs, they existed.