Profile

South African born Backend Engineer living in the vibrant city of Berlin, Germany .

I enjoy learning new things every day. I like to counteract sitting at the keyboard with some hiking and exploring new parts of the city and its surroundings.

Spoken Languages

  • English - native
  • German - Spoken very good, written B1 level

Hobbies

Im an ardent reader and love to watch movies, maybe too much as it sucks away the time I could be learning something new or reading the multitude of unread books I have.
My only other vice except for copious amounts of coffee is good tv shows.

I also have a passion for tasting exotic / craft / microbrewed beers from around the world and would take a good beer over wine any day.

Technical Skills

After years of semi professional ruby use, I know spend the majority of my time programming professionally in Ruby and using this to develop and maintain the companies Ruby on Rails based API.

I am proficient in many areas of Devops / Infrastructure management / Classical Sysops as this is what my previous roles were based on. After 12 years of classical System /Network Administration I moved to Berlin to work in an interesting startup where I started with a more Devops position working with powershell, ruby and puppet and maintaining the companies various Windows and Linux servers. This led ultimately to my goal of moving into a Backend Developer Position.

I still maintain the companies puppet based infrastructure automation system but am mainly focused on developing my skills as a ruby developer.

Work Experience

Pixformance Sports

Jul 2017 - Present
Ruby Backend Developer
  • Designing, implementing and maintaining the Rails based RESTful API
  • Designing and implementing new features for this API which serves Pixformance's various front end clients
  • Maintaining the Puppet infrastructure automation system that manages all the Pixformance stations in the field
Notable Tasks:
  • Upgrading a relatively large codebase from Rails 4.2 to Rails 5.2

Pixformance Sports

Feb 2014 - Jul 2017
Windows/Linux Server Administration / Devops-Backend-Infrastructure / Puppet Automation-Config Management
  • Migrated a large scale centralized geographically separate Active Directory Domain (1000 computers) to a decentralized fault tolerant fleet being managed exclusively by Puppet.
  • Administer and maintain Linux Servers to manage this puppet site.
  • Contribute to and help to maintain a Ruby on Rails Backend System to communicate with these machines.
  • Monitor application reliability and assess potential problems using New Relic.

International School of Duesseldorf

mid 2002 - late 2013
Windows Server Administration / Network Admin / IT Support
  • Responsible for a large network of 800 computers divided into 2 Active Directory Domains
  • Responsible for the maintenance and support of 8 Servers including 2 Domain Controllers and a SQl Server

Solms Training and Consulting

mid 2001 - mid 2002
Web Designer/ Network Admin(Linux) / Lecturer (Javascript)
  • Responsible for designing and maintaining the colleges website
  • Responsible for maintaining the network of lab computers running linux
  • Taught a course on Javascript

Education

A previous employer had a good mission statement which I strive to adhere to in my private and professional life. The phrase is: "Where Life Long Learning Begins" and it echoes my belief that you should never stand still and stagnate you should always be learning new things!

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA: Bsc Comp Sci Distance Learning : Pretoria, South Africa
2010 - 2015

I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science/Information Systems

SOLMS TRAINING AND CONSULTING cc, Emmarentia, South Africa
2001-mid 2001

I passed the Exams and obtained the competency certificates for the following courses:
  • Programming in Java
  • Advanced Java
  • Enterprise Java Beans
  • Object Orientated Analysis and Design using UML
  • Distributed Systems via CORBA

THE ZONE COMPUTER CAREER CAMPUS, Rivonia, South Africa
2000

  • A+ and N+ Courses (No exams written)
  • MCP Windows 2000 (Microsoft Certified Professional)
  • MCSE Windows 2000(Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer)

Contact

Find me on the following social networks and befriend/follow me if you like what you see :)



If you would like to contact me just send me an E-Mail. My email address is easy to guess. Just use my first name: (tim)+ @ + timlewis.name