Gary Murdock

• I started working for Rank in the Sports team where we were tasked with taking over from a Team in mexico. The aim was to not outsource the work anymore and for Rank to take over the sports betting page in-house.
• I developed reusable components to facilitate faster development timelines and improve overall code quality.
• The hand over was successful and over the past year my team and I have completely rewritten the entire web app in order to drastically better the loading speed of our website.
• I have really enjoyed my time at Rank and have learnt a lot about how big corporate companies work. This was my first taste of a proper working Dev environment with the correct processes in place to ensure everything is done correctly and monitored/ tested throughout the development phases.
• I understand the importance of having a proper process in place to insure all changes that are made are aligned with business/design and are then tested and worked on before going live.
• We recently upgraded our CMS to use a system that works much better and faster with out content creators. Umbraco makes use of graphQL queries that help getting the information we need so much easier and simpler by allowing use to pull only the data we need.
• We make use of Kambi's 3rd party tools as our Betting Odds provider and although their documentation can sometimes be all over the place and can cause some issues I have enjoyed working with them and using their API's

• I found a job with Peace Parks Foundation for a 1 year contract with Offerzen
• I was hired as a Frontend developer to build an online store which was used by all SA National Parks rangers to share experiences on equipment/tools they used in the field. I was using react to create this project and my boss helped with the strapi CMS backend that was hosted on Azure.
• Once I finished up with the online store I Had the opportunity to work on some exciting new projects and technologies. Helped with drilling into rhino horns and installing tracking devices to test new safer methods on tracking rhinos in the parks.

Snapcatch

• This is one of the internal systems that was being used for PPF to monitor all camera traps and with the use of AI detection system Poacher Detection they are able to alert rangers at the park when threats are detected. This system makes use of a custom SMTP server that feeds data from the camera traps to node-red where the data is filtered and sent to the react snapcatch Frontend. I made some UI changes to the Frontend and was later put in charge of the whole project and had to ensure it was online and working from time to time.

ChirpStack

• Peace Parks foundation makes use of LORA networking towers at all of the parks and chirpstack is an application that is used to store and authenticate all of the tracking devices that are in the field mostly for Rhinos and Ranger movements. I would make use of this application to monitor the network at the parks and try and give rangers some feedback on what was happening when devices stopped working to try and resolve the issues.

General roles and responsibilities

• Create Isivivane(online store for rangers) from scratch with the use of Figma designs.
• Talk to Project managers about development, changes and issues. Work with content creators to build a web app to best display what info they wanted to display.
• Maintenance and upkeep of ChirpStack and Snapcatch.
• Worked in field to help with Networking issues at the nature reserves and find solutions for Rihno taging and tracking with the use of geo tracking and displaying it on the frontend.

Tech Stack

• React
• Material UI
• Figma
• Strapi
• Azure
• Node-RED

• This was where I started my career and was taught to use react and AWS services.
• After my first year I was given some more responsibility and had to look after 3 juniors on a project for Obsidian and Rawson.
• I enjoyed the more management role I had been given and this is were my interest for people management and frontend was sparked.
• Worked on projects for Liberty, Rawson, Obsidian, Shoprite and Checkers.

IControl

• I helped with building an IoT application that delivered substation data to a central point with the use of an on-prem server running on Linux. The backend was built with NodeJS, MySQL with both running in their own Docker containers. The Frontend was built in React. This was the first project I started working on at Autumn Leaf where I created some frontend components to display live information on how their mines are operating at the different locations in one central location.

Financial

• Software engineer that was part of building an internal app for a financial institute. I was tasked with setting up Authorization/Authentication and exploring alternatives to AWS Cognito for Liberty for some data migration we were doing for them.

Rawson

• Worked on upgrading their internal system and recreating what they had using react.

Shoprite and Checkers

• Mainly focused on DataLab projects such as Executive Dashboard and Sixty60 Dashboard at the end of my time for Autumn Leaf but felt I needed a new challenge.

Tech Stack

• React
• Material UI/ CSS
• Python
• MongoDB
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon API Gateway
• JavaScript

• This was my first ever IT experience after high school where I did 3 years of IT as one of my subjects. It was a big eye-opener for me to see a real-world example and this motivated me to study BSc degree.
• JavaScript
• HTML
• CSS