Portrait of Dan Southwood-Wells

Dan Southwood-Wells

Engineer, hacker, accidental app developer.

Co-founded EskomSePush (ESP), used by over 10 million South Africans. Previously CTO at Superbalist and Engineering Director at Takealot. I like building things that work.

Cape Town, South Africa

EskomSePush Get in touch

Experience

EskomSePush — Co-founder & CTO

February 2015 — Present

Co-founded EskomSePush with Herman Maritz. What started as a loadshedding app grew to over 10 million active users and became a household name in South Africa.

At peak, 3.6M+ daily active users and 1.5M API requests per minute, with sub-50ms p99 latency. All run by a tiny team on a remarkably small budget.

These days ESP covers electricity, water and internet outages, with communities helping keep each other informed.

  • Flutter
  • Google Cloud
  • Python
  • Kubernetes/GKE
  • Prometheus
  • Varnish
  • Serverless
  • Firebase/Firestore

Superbalist — CTO

November 2019 — July 2022

CTO. We stayed up on Black Friday. Things were mostly on time, mostly on budget, and many people were hired.

  • Everything Tech (Engineering & Product)

Takealot — Engineering Director & Engineering Manager

December 2015 — October 2019

Helped build Takealot Marketplace, then led engineering across Marketplace, Finance and Customer Service Experience. Thousands of sellers, millions of products, and quite a few moving parts.

  • Scale
  • Customer Service Experience
  • Finance
  • Marketplace

Entersekt Ltd. — Architect

October 2012 — November 2015

Architect for the enterprise-grade multifactor authentication solution — Transakt.

  • Systems Architecture
  • Product Analysis
  • Client Engagement

Telkom SA Ltd. — Technical Product Development

February 2010 — October 2012

Technical product development and systems analysis in Managed IP Services.

  • Software Development
  • Product Development
  • Business Analysis

Rhodes University — CS Tutor & MSc

2003 — 2009

Computer Science 1 & 2 tutor. Systems administration of the Centre of Excellence (CoE) servers. MSc in Computer Science conferred.

  • Computer Science Tutoring
  • System Administration

Skills

Software & Systems

Full-stack development, distributed systems, performance and reliability. Mostly interested in building things that work — and keeping them working.

  • Python
  • Dart
  • (No)SQL
  • Git

Infrastructure & Scale

Cloud infrastructure, networking, Kubernetes, caching, monitoring and squeezing unreasonable amounts of traffic through sensible infrastructure.

  • Kubernetes
  • Google Cloud
  • Varnish
  • Nginx
  • Prometheus

Currently Tinkering

Local LLMs, AI coding tools, geospatial data, home infrastructure and whatever else looked interesting this week.

  • Local LLMs
  • vLLM
  • Geospatial
  • Docker
  • Linux

Contact

The quickest way to reach me is via email, social channels, or the ZA Tech community.