Bruce Blacklaws

Bruce Blacklaws

CEO and Founder, App Evolved | Open for freelance work | Learning about Buddhism

I create apps in PHP and JavaScript. I have a big interest in startups

Reviews of the books I've read

I'm always open to new opportunities

Preferably remote or Southern Suburbs, Cape Town

Request Interview

In industry since August 2008

CEO and Founder

App Evolved, November 2017 - Present (1 year, 7 months)

I'm building every aspect of the business and technical product myself. App Evolved is something I'll always be working on. Selling my apartment provided the initial capital I used to get the company off the ground and I am running the company on a very tight budget

I incorporated App Evolved as a limited liability company in two countries:

South Africa
United Kingdom

I ensured accounting was configured and that the company is tax compliant with the annual returns filed and I opened a business bank account. I work with accountants in both South Africa and the UK

Working well over 12 hours everyday is a routine occurrence for me

DevOps Engineer

Ringier One Africa Media, August 2018 - March 2019 (8 months)

Linux Systems Engineer

Aware Corporation, April 2015 - October 2017 (2 years, 7 months)

Remote Linux Systems Administrator

35 East, April 2016 - June 2016 (3 months)

Systems Engineer

Indaba Mobile, June 2013 - February 2015 (1 year, 9 months)

Systems Administrator

i-Soft Networks, October 2012 until May 2013 (8 months)

Junior Operations Engineer

Thought Express, May 2011 until June 2012 (1 year, 1 month)

Junior Engineer

Liberty Health Holdings, August 2008 - April 2011 (2 years, 8 months)

Summary

You can hire me for full stack web application development or something in platform or devops engineering

I'm the founder of App Evolved. I created Task Complete, Code Jobs, The PHP Shop, Private Goals, Beer Now and Perfect Places in my spare time. I have plenty other examples of my work I can show you during an interview

The work descriptions and my skills listed here are only brief summaries. I can elaborate on the details and provide comprehensive information during an interview

Skills

Web Application Development
- Frontend
  - JavaScript
    - Versions
      - ES5
  - CSS
    - Box model
  - HTML
- Backend
  - PHP
    - Versions
      - 5.3
      - 5.4
      - 7.1
    - Design Patterns
      - Front controller
      - MVC
    - Paradigms
      - Procedural
      - Object-oriented
    - Frameworks
      - Laravel
    - Databases
      - Relational
        
        MySQL
      - Document based
        
        MongoDB
    - Caching
      - In-memory
        
        memcached
  - Node.js
    - Versions
      - 6.10
      - 8.10
- Architectures
  - Monolithic
  - Microservices
  - RESTful
- Stacks
  - LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
Platform and DevOps Engineering
- Linux Systems Administration
  - Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 LTS
  - CentOS 5/6
- Systems Automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
  - Puppet
  - BASH
  - CloudFormation
  - Terraform
  - Jenkins
- Public Cloud Architecture
  - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    - EC2 Auto Scaling
  - Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  - Linode
  - Digital Ocean
- Platform as a Service (Serverless)
  - AWS Lambda
  - GCP App Engine
  - Heroku
LAN/WAN design, implementation and management
- IPv4
- Branch networks
- Cisco
Building Businesses
- Instantiating
  - South Africa: Companies and Intellectual Property Commission
  - United Kingdom: Companies House
- General operations
- Trying to raise capital
  - Bootstrapping
  - Lending money from my mom

Web Application Development Experience: Intermediate

My predominantly used and favourite stack is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and I've built most of my app backends using this technology stack

Some of my apps use a Node.js backend in AWS Lambda behind API Gateway

I definitely prefer working on the app backend although, you can hire me for a full stack position

Platform and DevOps Engineering Experience: Senior

I have experience with Puppet and managing large scale server deployments globally (servers > 150) and I have experience with monitoring using New Relic (APM, Infrastructure), Zabbix and Nagios

I've built highly available GNU/Linux server infrastructure capable of scaling the hosted application to thousands of concurrent users

I'm happy architecting and building backend infrastructure both in the public cloud and on physical hardware on-premises

I've created CI/CD pipelines that are invoked by Jenkins and deploy into autoscaling EC2 using the blue-green deployment strategy

Building Businesses Experience: Junior

Solve problems. Build products. Perform work on the ground. Get customers. Launch startups. Fail. Try again

Recommendations

Ringier One Africa Media (1 recommendation)
Indaba Mobile (5 recommendations)

"Bruce was the new guy in our team, but he quickly got down to business and within a few days he was pushing out complex Puppet code driven out of Hiera. Bruce also sunk his teeth into our Infrastructure AWS stacks driven out of Cloudformation code, and quickly managed to get familiar with it..."

Riaan Nolan, Head of DevOps Engineering - Ringier One Africa Media

"...And Bruce did very, often working under very severe pressure but still delivering the required assistance. I have complete confidence in Bruce and his abilities."

Ray Musvibe, Technical Lead - Indaba Mobile