Ian de Beer

I am a software developer by profession, while in my free time I do trail running in the beautiful mountains around my home town Stellenbosch, South Africa - also known as the Cape Winelands, for the wonderful wines from the region. When I find time and inspiration, I also write poetry in my mother tongue, Afrikaans.

PROFILE

The start of my career in the IT industry pre-dates the internet era. I have worked on real-time embedded systems, large B2B integration projects and lately Big Data Analytics and Distributed Ledger Technology. Over the past 25 years I have established and managed 4 software technology companies. During this time I was able to maintain a deep level of technical leadership in all the projects, from conceptualisation and architectural design through coding and implementation.

As one of the early adopters of the Scala language, I have a deep understanding and experience in Reactive and Functional programming paradigms, with a special interest in the compositional nature of Petri Nets and how it can be applied in the development of Decentralized Applications (dApps).

Recently my focus has been on developing a Decentralised Marketplace Platform utilising W3C standards for DID and DIDComm along with Tokenisation and Smart Contract technology.

EDUCATION

HS Transvalia - Vanderbijlpark: Matriculated 1973

University of South Africa 1978 - 1981: Diploma Data Metrics

WORK EXPERIENCE

MN8 Technology — Founder / CTO (Aug 2019 - October 2022) Startup focused on developing a platform for integrating Self Sovereign Identity (Indy and Aries) and Smart Contracts (Ergo, Cardano and DAML on Fabric) on Cloud Native technology.

EOH - Chief Technology Officer (July 2018 - Aug 2019) Run EOH Innovation Centre; Identity BlockChain; Big Data; MultiCloud

zenAptix — Founder and CEO (2001 - 2018) Run EOH Big Data Lab; Created Aqueduct Fast/BigData Fabric on Kafka, Cassandra, Akka, Elastic, Openshift (Kubernetes and Containers)

Visoft — Founder and CEO (1997 - 2001) eCommerce and B2B using Java; CORBA, J2EE, J2ME, ebXML

Independent Contractor (1985 - 1997) Houwtek (SA Space Program) LeisurePlan (Holiday and Flight Booking Web Site in the early days of the Internet)

URSA Software — Founder and CEO (1990 - 1993) Image Processing (X-Ray scanning annotation, transmission and storage)

TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

Programming: Passionate about Functional Programming, Scala

Cloud Computing and Dev/Ops: Deep understanding of Cloud Native Compute environment, Containers, Orchestration, Function as a Service/Serverless

Data: IoT, Big/Fast Data, GeoTemporal correlation, GraphDb’s

COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Presented at Local and International Conferences CamelOne/Redhat: Boston; ebXML: Barcelona; EOH Connect and Oracle Partner Conferences in South Africa.

INNOVATION AND PRODUCTS

Castanet: Dynamically Executable Decentralised Workflow Engine; Qanat: Decentralised Marketplace Platform; Aqueduct: Fast Data Fabric; Medimba: Medical Image Base; McCaddy: Golf Mobile App);

OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTIONS

Ergo-Castanet

Castanet

rxZmqStreams

Not so recent past: ActiveMQ, Camel, Mule.