About me

First things first, I need to clear up things around my name. If you know me from South Africa or work with me at Youi, I am known as Gysie, anywhere else where Afrikaans is not spoken I introduce myself as Jan, it is just much easier to correct the pronounciation of Jan than to try and get people to pronounce Gysie. I found this page and it helps with explaining how to pronounce Afrikaans consonants.

Now more about myself, I started my career as a software developer in 2008 with a course in UniVerse Basic and for 10 years it has been my main focus. It has been good to me, gave me a good career and is the reason I was able to relocate my family from South Africa to Australia.

In 2017 Rocket Software added Python support to UniVerse and I was sold, I dabbled in C# and JavaScript before then but it just did not give me the warm and fuzzies like Python did. We tried hard to make more use of Python but apart from UniVers Basic we were mainly a .Net shop and it never really took off. Late 2018 I got the opportunity to lead the newly formed Tooling Team, and I thought this would be my chance to the world! Get everyone to ditch UniVerse Basic AND .Net for Python! Hey a man can dream can’t he?

Things unexpectedly changed for me when Youi decided to get into the cloud space, my learning curve went from a managable gradient to close to a 90 degree incline. AWS is a beast and there is so much to learn, but I am relishing every moment of it. This comes to the reason for me starting this blog.

To try and learn and retain what I learn’t I thought of creating a blog to at least, be my filing system but also share what I learn. There are also some schools of thought that suggest you learn/understand better when explaining a topic to someone else, I am no teacher but a blog seems to be a good platform to do this from.