The Editor's Desk · Who Sets This Type · Cape Town
Before the code, there was the workshop.
The proprietor served his apprenticeship in iron, oil, and water long before he set a line of type in software. The same hands now build websites, custom platforms, and mobile apps — and the engineering came first.
For fifteen years and more, the proprietor of this workshop earned his living with his hands — on factory floors, aboard ships, and on the decks of drilling vessels far out at sea. He came to software the long way round, and counts that an advantage. The discipline that fits a coupling to a thousandth of an inch, or writes a standard operating procedure a night shift can follow without him, is the same discipline that now ships a booking system or a mobile application. The trade changed. The method did not.
- Apprenticed in iron. A formal fitter & turner apprenticeship, served alongside correspondence study in mechanical engineering. The engineering mindset predates the code; not self-taught from a standing start.
- Schooled at sea. A marine engineering cadetship — classroom and practicals through a maritime training academy, and time served aboard a working vessel.
- Tried offshore. Several seasons in oil & gas (2008–2013) as roustabout and roughneck aboard drilling vessels, lending a hand to the subsea department on blow-out-preventer work — the kind of job that teaches a man to check his work, because the sea does not grant revisions.
- Kept the trades. Rope-access technician; dive-equipment maintenance. Work measured in safety, not opinion.
- Ran the workshop. Two years as technician for an international fluid-management company — oversaw the in-house workshop, ran the local testing and demonstration facility, drafted the standard operating procedures, and kept the maintenance and production costs honest.
- Founded a concern. A fluid-management venture of his own. He has been a proprietor before; he knows what it asks of a person.
- Managed the build. Project Manager for the southern-African arm of an international engineering group, running installation projects; then Workshop Manager at a pump distributor — after-sales, stock, assemblies, and a small staff.
Then a turn that matters more than the rest. For a year and a half he sold bespoke business-automation software to South African small businesses — sat across the desk from the owner, listened to what was asked for, and learned the quiet gap between what a proprietor requests and what the work actually needs. TinWorx is what he builds in that gap. Few developers have stood on the selling side of this exact table. He has.
A plain word on the software itself, since the Herald does not deal in inflation. He has set type for the web for years — websites built and shipped alongside the other trades, the way a workshop keeps a lathe for its own jobs. The turn came when the press became the full trade: these last years he has worked it full-time, building custom platforms at enterprise scale — and it is that work, he will tell you plainly, that made a serious developer of him. The methods are modern: React and TypeScript for the web, Flutter for mobile, Google Cloud beneath, and AI-assisted tooling to keep one pair of hands moving like several. Still sharpening the craft, and says so — with twenty years of workshop discipline already in his hands. Read the rest of the record and decide for yourself whether that reads as caution or as the surest foundation a small business could ask for.