About
About Jacques
Jacques is what people tend to term a "geek" for his one hobby which deals with computers. From his first PC (286) when he was in primary school, he started learning basic. A couple of years and computers later, he changed from coding basic to writing shell scripts, some stuff in c and perl programs while at high school. After high school he started coding perl and PHP professionally, and the rest they say is history.
the past
Jacques has years of experience with developing web-based CMS deployed on various websites using utilised two different code bases. The first code base is based on his an earlier release of a coding project which later turned into Ataris Backstage which was used by numerous websites including Protea Chemicals, Smook Wines, Conns Manufacturing, Essential Cleaning Services, African Maritime Services, ISP Data, my personal website, and Suzuki South to name a few of the sites running the software to power their websites. I wrote plugins for things like blogs, company news, galleries, mailing list management, depending on client requirements.
He has also experimented with mobile technologies and has written various web-based SMS solutions over the past couple of years for websites of various companies and other websites including etv, #Cape_Town, 96 Degrees Superclub, SMS World, Monkey Trade, ISP Data and Firstier, to name a few. He also maintains an open source SMS PEAR Library for sending SMS messages via the Clickatell SMS Gateway. Clickatell’s SMS gateway connects to over 800+ mobile operators across the globe.
He has a nack for technology having implemented various not often seen technologies from mobile phone related – vcards, flash sms, etc. into websites of clients utilising PHP.
He has been involved in various opensource projects from PHP where he administers the server where the PHP Documentation Team’s tools reside.
He also has over 16 years of systems administation experience using the FreeBSD Operating System. In his spare time he provided pro-bono support for a local high school where he was their Systems Administrator as well as providing technical support for various administrative staff over a period of a few years.
He has developed web-based applications for various companies and has been dealing with developing systems which start having performance hits due to the traffic that these sites generate. He has experience scaling such sites using open source technology as well using database query optimisation experience from developing multiple large webbased online business directories which do complex SQL joins among other things. Content caching of static content is also useful. Usage of software such as memcached and perlbal are instrumental in improving performance.
He codes mainly using PHP and ocassionaly uses perl, python, shell script or c depending on the job requirements. He believes in using the right tool for the job rather than using the wrong one. He has also started dabbling with Ruby on Rails.
He has experience using various version control systems such as a CVS and Subversion where the bulk of the code which he maintains is stored.
He is a techno junkie and interested in blogging from the days before online journals got branded as blogs and brad was a university student. Who would have ever thought that writing online journals would take off? Sure when I first got online in 1994 we were using lynx to surf the net. Next came Trumpet Winsock of all things which was a nightmare to configure and get working! That was back in the day. Remember modem initialisation strings? I maintained a stumbleupon collection of links which I recommend once upon a time.
He has been certified as "one of the three most important people in WordPress" by Matt Mullenweg and has the certificate hanging in his office.
the present
He’s employed as a systems support engineer for a cloud computing provider.
the future
I’m not sure what the future holds – hopefully I will have time to work on some mashups.
Presentations
Occasionally I talk a "Geek Events". Here is a list of presentations which I have presented since 2008.
- Introduction to Memcached
Facebook Developers Garage, Cape Town, South Africa
12 February 2008
