CV: Jannie van Tonder (trading as Makouvlei.net)

Background

Jannie matriculated in 1980. He spent the following 10 years working as a successful jazz trombonist, drummer, arranger, teacher and musical director, based in Johannesburg and touring extensively throughout Southern Africa. In 1991 he moved to Amsterdam, Holland, from where he operated on the European jazz circuit until 1996, when he settled in Cape Town, South Africa with his family. He is still active as a performer & teacher, notably at the Jazz Workshop where he's been teaching part-time for the last 10 years, and where he leads the Biggish Band, a 19-piece African Jazz band playing original compositions and arrangements of South African standards.

In 1991 he started using computer programming for composing & arranging music. This interest soon expanded to other fields and he launched his first web site in August 1996. In 1996 he started working at Dockside Internet, and in 1997 took over the management of the fledgling Web Development Division.

Soon realising the need for a more advanced and dynamic approach in this competitive industry, he researched, tested and introduced the use of database and ASP technology to the company's product range .. He saw the company grow to 4 development teams which operated in tandem, focusing on analysis, design, programming & integration respectively, to produce high quality integrated web based applications for Dockside's wide range of clients. He was appointed to the board as Production Director in 1999, in which capacity he remained until leaving Dockside in February 2001, to work as a freelance Internet Consultant and Developer.

Over the last 6 years he has completed a variety of projects on a contract basis, some working independently, supplying his own programming & development skills, in combination with sourcing other specialist services from a network of highly competent individuals, and others working as an outsourced entity for development companies.

Experience

During the 4½ years at Dockside Internet, Jannie picked up extensive experience in Internet Development and Production Management, heading up a department of 14 developers (designers, programmers & copywriters), working on multiple projects concurrently.

His strength lies in his ability to see the bigger picture, having picked up an in-depth understanding of all aspects of Internet Development, from the initial analysis & conceptualisation phase, through the complete development cycle, to the technical aspects of launching & hosting an integrated & tested product. Click here to see a list of clients & references.

He has considerable hands-on experience in both programming & design, and early on recognised the need for a new focus on the high level integration of design & programming in a web development environment, where the need for traditional programming principles to co-exist with highly technical and advanced design concepts was a new phenomenon.

This concept of Information Design has been embraced by the Web Development community at large in recent years. It relies on specialist skills which purely focus on the final phases of development, integration, data input & testing, implementing rigid quality control through constant feedback to other teams resulting in revision of analysis, programming & design techniques, and thus maintaining a high level of end product development.

At Dockside he was also responsible for initiating and overseeing the production of a template based development system, where various modules representing generic parts of a web site could be produced very quickly and then customised to the particular needs of the project at hand. This had several advantages:

• the reusable code would be thoroughly tested & re-tested on every new implementation, thus resulting in constant refining and improvement of the product, and reducing testing & development time
• all these modules are built around the same core and thus interact seamlessly with each other, and with the same database structures, thus enabling the addition of global searches, administration of global variables, easy adding and removing of additional modules & upgrades.

Skill Set

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Contact me at +27 21 762 8026 or +27 72 189 2481 or jannie@work.co.za for a free consultation.