My first computer
I got my first computer when I was three. I mostly played around in Microsoft Word. By the time I was ten or so, I was making things in Dreamweaver and Flash.
At about twelve, I started trying to make money online. I put Amazon affiliate links on WordPress sites and tried to get the sites to show up in search. I also built a travel booking site called TravelFish that used affiliate links.
Making themes for Facebook
At fourteen, I built iStyla, a browser extension that let you change the way Facebook looked. You could pick a theme or make your own.
I ran the business and built the theme editor and the store where people shared their designs. At its peak, around 80,000 people used iStyla.
Running a business in high school
In high school I imported products from China and sold them in South Africa on Takealot and through my own store. I had my own smartwatch brand, Metro Watch, and sold tablets to schools.
At sixteen I realised people would pay me to build software for them. One of my consulting projects was Flippit, a matric study app that Oxford University Press commissioned in 2015. Sanjiv Ranchod and I built it through React Technology.
That year, the Mail & Guardian included me in its 200 Young South Africans.
By Grade 12 I had so much work that my school gave me an exemption from attending classes to run my businesses. I kept consulting after I finished school, learning the tech each project needed.
Three months in Silicon Valley
When I was fourteen, I read The Launch Pad, a book about Y Combinator. I wanted to see what it was like to build a company in Silicon Valley.
After a few years of consulting, I joined Names & Faces as the second developer on the team. In 2018, when I was twenty, I went with the team to Silicon Valley for three months during YC.
It felt a bit like stepping into the book. I remember driving past Evernote’s offices and recognising the logo. I’d only ever seen it on my screen, and here was the building where people made the thing I used.
I spent several years working with Names & Faces from Cape Town. I worked on our design system and helped developers in different time zones keep up with decisions we’d made. In small teams I often had to learn whatever the job called for, whether that was frontend or mobile development, backend systems, infrastructure, or DevOps.
During the pandemic I went back to consulting, worked with Journey, and spent more time teaching. Later I joined Milk Video, where I worked until February 2022. We rendered video in the browser. Keeping the clips, captions, and scenes in sync was tricky enough that I gave a Demuxed talk about how we did it.
Teaching React
I like helping other developers understand how things work. I write articles, make YouTube tutorials, and speak at conferences. Sometimes a subject needs a whole course.
In Learn Recoil, we built a drawing app to learn state management in React. Once we had the basics working, we got into data fetching, Suspense, and what to do when editing one shape made the others render again. The Recoil team featured the course in their official learning resources. I also contributed to Recoil’s experimental React Native support.
Recoil is now archived, but I’ve kept the course notes and examples here. I’d like to do more teaching on this site, especially with examples you can see or try for yourself.
My courses, articles, and talks
Starting Fudge
My co-founder Simeon and I started Fudge in 2022. Our first product helped developers figure out what had gone wrong by looking at session recordings and logs.
Some of our customers ran online stores and kept asking if we could make their sites faster. That became our next product. Later I spent a lot of time on machine learning, working out which products to recommend to shoppers. Today we’re building AI agents for e-commerce.
Years on small teams have made me comfortable working on the interface as well as the systems behind it. At Fudge I also spend time figuring out what our customers need us to build. I’m writing up what we built and why we changed direction. I’ll share more of what I learned in the Library.
