software developer · ml/ai
Hi, I'm Nic.
I'm a software engineer from Johannesburg, now building in the Netherlands. I like making the tools I wish I had: Forkcell hands a ticket to an AI agent and gets back a tested pull request, and KB answers questions about a codebase with citations to the exact lines. My route into AI was research: at Wits I evolved Super Mario levels with a genetic algorithm and used reinforcement learning to speed it up, which became a published paper. Off the clock, I'm usually tinkering with my homelab.
PHP / Laravel
TypeScript
Python
PostgreSQL
RAG / LLMs
Reinforcement Learning
experience
Software Engineer · aqqo
Full-stack work on a venue-booking platform — Laravel APIs, React and TypeScript frontends.
- Built the platform's AI assistant end-to-end: streaming chat (Vercel AI SDK), a tool-calling layer that queries live booking data, and the UI that renders tool results — with accessibility (WCAG) passes.
- Moved the platform's entire database migration pipeline from Flyway to Laravel migrations — including provisioning new environments with multi-tenant databases and queue-worker management.
- Ship cross-repo features across three codebases (timezone-safe dates, batch operations, EN/DE localization, tested at every layer) and own the path to production: code review, deploys, hotfixes, server fixes.
- Sole platform-team member owning discovery through delivery: stakeholder interviews, spec writing, roadmap, then implementation — zero handoffs.
Software Developer · Zero2One Digital
- Built full-stack Laravel features (Vue.js, Livewire frontends), integrated third-party REST APIs, and supported production deployments on AWS and Azure via Forge and Envoyer.
Software Developer · Squid Academy
- Sole developer of an e-commerce and e-learning platform: custom payment gateways, video delivery, and database restructuring for scale.
education & research
University of the Witwatersrand
- MSc Computer Science — dissertation on planning complex tasks in partially observable 3D environments, bridging learning-based and classical planning.
- BSc Computer Science with Honours, achieved with distinction.
- Published: Procedural Content Generation Through Evolutionary Search and RL (arXiv, 2022).