My name is Michael Botes, but everyone calls me 'Boats', I'm a
Architect (INTJ) and
Red/Yellow personality type and what this means is that I'm an extremely independant
and driven Individual that loves being made responsible for tasks and getting down to the bottom of really
complex issues and scenarios.
I studied at the Pearson Institute of Higher Education, which was formerly known as CTI College, where I received my BSc in Computer Systems under the Heriot Watt University international program.
I am a bit of a curious badger, I started out as a front-end developer and found myself being fascinated by
just about every aspect of web development, so I would end up scratching and digging relentlessly at things
until I slowly figured it out, this has led to me having a pretty broad comfort zone but not really having
profoundly deep knowledge in a particular field, I definitely have a higher proficiency in Front-end
engineering and have a big fascination for cloud technology, and thus have quite a bit of skill in Google
Cloud & Kubernetes but at the same time can get my hands dirty in Azure DevOps for example.
Long story short is that give me a task and I will figure it out and if I get stuck, I can find the right
people to help me finish it and learn along the way.
I currently Live in Cape-Town, South Africa, after having lived in Johannesburg for the last 3 years, with my wife and three cat children. My hobbies include gaming, used to raid World of Warcraft on Sunday and Monday nights, Reading fantasy books, and playing jazz/blues guitar.
2021
Vulcan Labs, Urban Hub, Unit F6, Bo-Kaap, 142 Buitengracht Street, Cape Town, 8001
Vulcan Labs2020 - 2021
2018 - 2020
Harambee Youth Employement Accelerator, 70 Fox St, Marshalltown, Johannesburg, 2001
Harambee Youth Employement Accelerator2017 - 2018
2017
Lightswitch Solutions, The Launchsite, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Cape Town, 7550, South Africa
Lightswitch Solutions2016 - 2017
Ourhood, Unit 7, The Bureaux, 46 Hans Strydom Avenue, Foreshore, Cape Town
OurHood2015 - 2016
Fullfacing Pty Ltd Unit 2, Atlas Gardens Business Park, 29 Sycamore Crescent, Durbanville, Cape Town, 7550, South Africa, www.fullfacing.com
Fullfacing2015
Fullfacing Pty Ltd Unit 2, Atlas Gardens Business Park, 29 Sycamore Crescent, Durbanville, Cape Town, 7550, South Africa, www.fullfacing.com
Fullfacing
I delivered a "first-of-it's-kind" in South Africa, mobile responsive counseling chatbot that uses Machine learning to learn from students behavior and responses that I designed and implemented as a bespoke UI which is used in production with over 30'000 students for the University of Pretoria, I was involved from the client requirements gathering, architecting to analysis and delivered the client side project which was written with the following technologies: React with Hooks and Context API with RecoilJS for Auth management, Django Rest Framework, Google Cloud Storage, DialogFlow, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine
I am happily serving as one of the Technical Team Leads on the strategic remediation project. On the day-to-day, I am one of the few who are responsible for the overview of our GCP landscape for our PROD and UAT environments. this has me monitoring performance, downtime events, etc. as well as the bringing up and down of environments and being the first respondent on prod issues/downtime. I am also involved with our front-end Scottish team, namely CaseBlocks, in managing a small local team as well as liaising with their teams in resolving issues on our Jira tickets for platform enhancements and remediations. Going forward I am taking a step back into the C# and .net world helping with services and Front-end using MVC and JQuery. All while planning with the other Team leads our new architecture going forward with the future of Harambee.
For my portfolio I wanted to use a modern design with colors and style matching my Curriculum Vitae, I also took the opportunity to see how far I could take simple html, css and javascript and deploy it on Github pages, use a 3D rendering library to create the daily alternating birds and geometric shape landing page and incorporate Google Maps and Analytics.
A little side project built in Vue 2 and vuex, to visualize data from a free open source api endpoint, this also uses charts and maps.
A little side project built in Vue 2 to fetch and manipulate results from an open source News Api, I also implemented a infinite scroll that polls the endpoint for next batch of results etc.
React for beginners course by Wes Bos, a simple react client side app, which uses react router and LocalStorage with real time data from firebase.
Joined DotModus as a front-end developer, as the sole front-end developer on the team I built a front-end, client-focused tool that allowed the company to track vehicles in the last hour on a map, and stored all metadata on each vehicle which was presented through a dashboard, there which we presented stats that were useful to the company. this system was built from the ground up using Vue.js, Vuex, Graphql, Vue-apollo, Solr, Django Rest Framework and Google Cloud Platform.
Crypto currency exchange listings page created with Vue.js and uses an open source crypto api (www.coingecko.com).
OurHood is a private online platform where you can connect with your neighbours and community. Finally an easy way to share information including crime info, recommendations and tradesmen referrals, lost pets, local services and general news. OurHood is hosted on AWS using RDS for MariaDB, ECS storage and EC2 Instances, the Backend is Node JS with Express and the Frontend is Jquery, LESS, Handlebars and Bootstrap. The Mobile App was built using React Native and is a complete port of functionality from the website. *Unfortunately the site and links were shutdown in 2021*
a full stack restaurant application which users can search, geolocate, review and curate their favourite restaurants from around the world. The application has three main models — Users, Stores and Reviews — all of which are relational. It is designed to hit upon many of today's application needs such as user authentication, database storage, Ajax REST API, file upload and image resizing.
In this project, I followed a tutorial that helps you make a random quote generator that you can post your favorite posts to Twitter.
My very first personal project, built while learning how to use the bootstrap framework and code pen.
