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 pronunciation 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. Our goal was to improve all of our development tooling and move closer to a proper DevOps environment and culture.

Things unexpectedly changed for me when Youi decided to get into the cloud space, my learning curve went from a manageable gradient to close to a 90 degree incline. We spent the next 18 or so months implementing an AWS Landing Zone together with a partner. We were close to getting this into production but due to a corporate alignment we had to move to Azure.

This was another 18 month journey but this time implementing an Azure landing zone, also with the guidance of a partner. Both these AWS & Azure environments had strict requirements from the board and the industry regulators, the main reason for the amount of time spent on these environments before they were production ready.

It was this whole cloud journey where I realised the value that proper DevOps brings to the table, also how much security has to be part of such a solution, therefore referring to DevSecOps instead. Yes it makes you start a bit slow, but the pace picks up quickly when everything is in place. The additional benefit I value is the confidence it creates in our supporting IT units, especially Security & Governance.

I will be using my blog to document some of the things I have learnt along the way, not just for me but to also share with whoever stumbles across the articles.