The journey of my career started in Johannesburg, and quite unconventionally for a matter of fact. I have always had a good eye for opportunity and knew how to be resourceful to get ahead. My brother was and continues to be, one of the best developers I know. He was that kid taking computers apart and rebuilding them by using the cupboard as his computer box! As a teenager, he taught himself C++ and C#, and by the time he finished school at the age of 17 was already getting scooped up by companies for his coding talent.

As my older brother, I always knew I could count on him, and count on him I do and did! In 2012, one of my best friends invited me to join an initiative with 2 other university friends of his. The idea was to start a business based around the Sakai Project, which is an open-source learning management system (LMS) initially developed by a team at MIT, and still widely used in higher education institutions globally. My greatest leverage at the time was access to resources, AKA my brother, which gave me a fairly large stake in our start-up business, Opulous. Once our LMS was developed, we went out to market, setting up at education expos, speaking to colleges and connections at the Department of Education, private schools, businesses, societies, and political parties. After a couple of months, we eventually had a fallout, which was triggered by the fact that we were burning through money. Our partner who was financing the business was disheartened, not taking into consideration the long sales cycle we would have, and was pressured by his family to dissolve the company and go down a different direction, which turned out to be tax consulting. 😐

Fast forward a year later to 2014, my journey as a Business Development Manager with Azurite Management Solutions kicks off, picking up from where I left off with Opulous. Azurite’s eLearning approach was based on Moodle as opposed to Sakai.  This was the point where my career started taking shape. As my journey into Moodle began, my product knowledge increased, through training and research, drafting proposals, doing product demos, and engaging with clients.  Being solutions-oriented I was always thinking of ways to solve our clients’ challenges.  Having done a bit of coding (Delphi) myself back in high school, I thought why not figure out how the code worked. Fortunately, I had the world wide web at my finger-tips, and a personal FREE professor, aka big bro, to direct me on what I should learn and look at. Once I was confident with my base, I made a move to join the development team. A year later, I find myself as the lead LMS developer, managing a small team. The rest is history, which I have taken the liberty to briefly outline for you below. 🙂

The journey of my career started in Johannesburg, and quite unconventionally for a matter of fact. I have always had a good eye for opportunity and knew how to be resourceful to get ahead. My brother was and continues to be, one of the best developers I know. He was that kid taking computers apart and rebuilding them by using the cupboard as his computer box! As a teenager, he taught himself C++ and C#, and by the time he finished school at the age of 17 was already getting scooped up by companies for his coding talent.

As my older brother, I always knew I could count on him, and count on him I do and did! In 2012, one of my best friends invited me to join an initiative with 2 other university friends of his. The idea was to start a business based around the Sakai Project, which is an open-source learning management system (LMS) initially developed by a team at MIT, and still widely used in higher education institutions globally. My greatest leverage at the time was access to resources, AKA my brother, which gave me a fairly large stake in our start-up business, Opulous. Once our LMS was developed, we went out to market, setting up at education expos, speaking to colleges and connections at the Department of Education, private schools, businesses, societies, and political parties. After a couple of months, we eventually had a fallout, which was triggered by the fact that we were burning through money. Our partner who was financing the business was disheartened, not taking into consideration the long sales cycle we would have, and was pressured by his family to dissolve the company and go down a different direction, which turned out to be tax consulting. 😐

Fast forward a year later to 2014, my journey as a Business Development Manager with Azurite Management Solutions kicks off, picking up from where I left off with Opulous. Azurite’s eLearning approach was based on Moodle as opposed to Sakai.  This was the point where my career started taking shape. As my journey into Moodle began, my product knowledge increased, through training and research, drafting proposals, doing product demos, and engaging with clients.  Being solutions-oriented I was always thinking of ways to solve our clients’ challenges.  Having done a bit of coding (Delphi) myself back in high school, I thought why not figure out how the code worked. Fortunately, I had the world wide web at my finger-tips, and a personal FREE professor, aka big bro, to direct me on what I should learn and look at. Once I was confident with my base, I made a move to join the development team. A year later, I find myself as the lead LMS developer, managing a small team. The rest is history, which I have taken the liberty to briefly outline for you below. 🙂