I'm a South African in Amsterdam, building payment systems for a living. Outside work, I play in bands, run long distances, and have spent most of my life on a pitch of some kind.

I grew up in Cape Town and studied Computer Science and Business Computing at UCT. I walked into payments straight out of university, and over a decade later it's still the work I want to be doing. The full company-by-company version lives on the experience page; this one is more about the shape of how I work.

Payments is unforgiving in a useful way. Every transaction is a real merchant trying to get paid by a real customer, the system has a hundred-millisecond window to be right, and there's no margin for almost. That intolerance for almost is what kept me here. Card-machine firmware in C, iOS and Android apps, the cloud rails between them, scheme certification with Visa, Mastercard, and Amex: different layers, same standard.

“ The payment is the moment a deal closes, when both merchant and customer have to trust the money will move. It has to be perfect.

The further along I've gone, the less of the work has been about whether my code works, and more about whether the team is solving the right thing. I try to be the engineer who unblocks the call: one well-placed conversation, or the architectural line held when it matters, rather than the one who has to be in every call.

Music is the thread that's run longest. Saxophone, guitar, vocals. I've toured and recorded with Grassy Spark, 7th Son, and Kings Down South, and performed in the Rocky Horror Show (listen). Playing live teaches you how to recover, in real time, when something goes wrong in front of a few hundred people. That instinct travels.

I came up playing rugby, tennis, water polo, and squash, and these days I run the long stuff. Sport is the inverse practice: staying calm when nothing has gone wrong yet, putting in the rep before it matters.

Amsterdam has been home since 2021. Across engineering, music, and sport the through-line is the same: stay with something long enough to get it right.