We’re excited to introduce our newest Business Analyst, Gerhard Van Wyk. We welcomed Gerhard to the team in March and in this article we will find out more about his background and interests.
My role is to understand what the client (business) really wants to achieve, and then translate that into easily understandable (and achievable) chunks of work for our engineering team to develop.
After finishing my degree in Mechanical Engineering, I spent the last 20 years or so working as a technical Business Analyst in eCommerce, across multiple domains, including Retail, Telecoms, Travel, Hospitality, Finance, Luxury Fashion, Medical Devices (SaMD), and the Automotive industry.
In my spare time, I also run a small consulting business, where I help start-ups define their business objectives, solidify their marketing strategy, and ultimately obtain seed funding.
Writing and implementing (from scratch) the Design & Development Procedures for a Software as Medical Device (SaMD) company, to allow them ISO13485 & IEC62304 accreditation. The process also included an online BSI audit for 2 full days!
The whole journey took almost 6 months, but the client is now officially classified as a Class 2(b) medical device, and may legally dispense medical advice via their app.
I would say the very first replatforming programme I ever did (in 2010), which was with Tesco. At the time, the concept of a “marketplace” had just been introduced by Amazon and eBay, and Tesco’s implementation of their “Sellers” concept was way ahead of its time.
At the time, it was the deemed the most “aggressive customisation” (Oracle’s words) of Oracle Web Commerce in Europe.
I was excited to join Filter, as it allows me my first role at agency side. Alongside that, Filter’s progressive, agile ethos allows for rapid pivoting during the Software Development Lifecycle, making them a much stronger player in the current development market than their larger monolithic counterpart agencies.
I also predict that Filter will be a major contender in the next 5 years and I’m excited to be part of that team.
I’m lucky enough to have a small home office, where I have all the basics setup, eg, laptop, dual monitors, printer, etc. My walls are lined with whiteboards for when the occasion calls for it and I use a Blue Yeti mic for those impromptu podcast sessions.
I’ve even recently added a SAD light to my set-up, for those dark, cold winter months. And finally, Alexa is always lurking in the background reminding me about her presence, when I inadvertently say her name on a phone call.
I think the future will see much more usage of blockchain for publicly accessible information. I suspect we’ll see this migration in large global niches, e.g. health records, insurance, etc. They main challenge there would be overcoming the cost associated with building the ledgers, as at scale, this might prove cost prohibitive.
I also think we’ll see much more about NFT’s being used to establish ownership of tangible and non-tangible assets. Specifically, things like smart contracts for immovable property, etc.
Get a feel for the kind of exciting technology projects Gerhard will be working on in his new role, by checking out some of our most interesting client success stories in recent years.
You can also read more about the company values that help us attract talented developers like Gerhard to our team by clicking here.
