Brendan Kamp

Senior Software Developer

Johannesburg, South Africa

Summary

My main passion is for everything Python, from web development to deep learning and all that is in-between. I started my career as a frontend developer, designing small web applications. I got really bored, very fast so I started looking at what I could do to challenge myself and along came Python.

As Ben Taylor said at his presentation at DSGO18, Passion = FOMO

I enjoy working with Python as well as complex data

I am shifting my career toward data science. In particular, I am very enthusiastic about deep learning models

I thoroughly enjoy developer communities and find the continuous learning that is required with my profession fantastic

But most importantly I am excited about the future of technology.

Languages:

English

Favorite Python Packages:

django, faker, responses, django-processengine, djangorestframework, django-rq, rq, django-redis, ipdb, celery, redis

Experience

• Consultant at Cellphone Telecom Company where I Cleaned and Fixed a Microservice System
  • Situation: The project had been in a state of neglect as the business had been pushing for deliverables and they did not understand the need of maintaining the underlying infrastructure
  • Task: Taking Broken Ansible Scripts and Docker Compose Configurations and cleaning up the deployment process along with making the system more environment aware
  • Actions: In my own personal time (As business still did not see the need) I took our microservice infrastructure and made it completely deployable using Ansible, I also cleaned up around 17 microservices to be “Environment aware”
  • Results: I created a more stable system that was vastly more dependable than the original

• Fibre Network Provider Implementing a switch over from Monolithic Data storages to Microservices
• Creating an analytics dashboards for a fibre sales teams to track order progressions using ELK stack (Elastic Search, Logstash and Kibana)
  • Situation: I have a huge passion for data and as a side project I started logging incoming requests into our system
  • Task: I had to setup a way to log changes in our data without having an impact on our overall request times or increasing load on our systems
  • Actions: I setup a clustered Elastic Search Instance hosted in our cluster with a Logstash instance accepting Http Requests, each microservice instance sent a request on any change in the data the service handled with the changes. This created the problem of load as the more the data changed the more requests where sent to Logstash and that caused it to slow down quite considerably. I created a small Golang App that I also hosted within the cluster and this apps job was to take in the requests and Asynchronously push the data into Logstash while freeing up the connection to the Microservices
  • Result: I had data I started to analyse which the sales department caught wind of and now my Kibana Dashboards are displayed in the sales department for them to track the progress of their sales

Skills

Ansible, Celery, Django, Django REST Framework, Docker, Git, Kubernetes, Linux, Machine Learning, PostgreSQL, Redis