Connected range platform
Ball tracking, bay software and the services behind them. Hundreds of installed bays that have to work unattended, across sites with unreliable connectivity.
Most of my career has been spent on systems with a physical consequence — a bay on a driving range, a sensor on a wall, a phone in someone's hand. That changes how you build. You cannot assume the network, the hardware, or the user.
At Inrange I lead four engineering disciplines building the platform behind connected driving ranges: ball tracking, the games people play between shots, the fleet systems keeping hundreds of bays online, and the data that tells us whether any of it brought someone back the following week.
The work I'm proudest of is rarely the feature. It's the recovery path that made a 3am failure boring, the cost audit that cut an infrastructure bill without touching the roadmap, or the engineer who took on something they weren't quite ready for and landed it.
Before Inrange I spent years in mobile at Polymorph and Mxit, building Android and iOS products at a scale South African engineering doesn't get enough credit for.
Selected work
Three problems that describe the kind of engineering I'm drawn to.
Instrumented home
ESP32 boards running ESPHome, feeding power, water and environment readings into Home Assistant. Designed, soldered and debugged at the kitchen table.
Cloud cost and data
An end-to-end audit across six AWS services, tracing spend back to the queries and jobs causing it, then cutting the bill without slowing the roadmap.
Experience
Sixteen years, three companies, one consistent theme: software with something physical on the other end of it.
Now
Head of Software, Inrange
Leading front-end, Unity, back-end and 3D teams. Architecture, delivery, hiring, and the technical strategy behind the range platform.
Earlier
Polymorph Systems
Mobile and backend engineering across client products, from concept through to store release and long-term support.
Earlier
Mxit
Building for one of South Africa's largest mobile platforms, where constrained devices and expensive data were the design constraints.
From the workshop
Hardware on the bench, a range at dusk, a dashboard mid-build.
images/workshop-1.jpg
images/workshop-2.jpg
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Toolbox
What I reach for, roughly in order of how much of my life each has taken.
Mobile
Kotlin, Java, Android, Swift, iOS
Real-time and 3D
C#, Unity, scene and build tooling
Web
TypeScript, React, Node
Backend and data
Python, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Postgres, Athena, Glue
Hardware
ESP32, ESPHome, Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant
Leadership
Architecture review, delivery planning, hiring, mentoring
Get in touch
If you're building something that has to survive contact with the real world, I'm glad to talk about it.