Author » Hennie Grobler

Hennie Grobler

Technical Architect

I'm an architect at SWAT where I fulfill a range of duties that range from being involved in development to R&D projects to assisting with the technical aspects of MIH mergers and acquisition's. Past experiences are mostly with SOA related projects but have since moved to mostly working with web and related technologies. I also try to keep up with the latest mobile trends and any gadgetry that may be out and about. And of course everything to do with gaming.

01 Mar 2012

Architecture, Performance and OSS Workshop

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MIH sponsored a workshop last week called Architecture, Performance and Open SourceSoftware (APOSS). This followed from a similar workshop that was held in São Paulo, Brazil in December.

The attendees were an interesting mix of people from a variety of the MIH companies in South Africa representing industries from web and mobile development to pay television. We all got together to discuss topics that affect us all, ranging from open source technologies, architecture, scalability and best practices.

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11 Oct 2011

SWAT Week in Tech (WiT) 10 October 2011

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Apple’s new iPhone would Like to Talk. An AI personal assistant called Siri is the biggest new feature of the iPhone 4S. Holding down the “home” button on the new iPhone 4S, available in the U.S. starting on October 14, summons a “personal assistant” known as Siri that can understand commands given in English, French, or German. It responds in a conversational style in both text and synthesized speech. When the question “Do I need a raincoat today?” was posed Siri responded in a similar manner: “It sure looks like rain today.”

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03 Oct 2011

SWAT Week in Tech (WiT) 3 October 2011

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Introducing Google Analytics Premium. Google Analytics Premium has been made available to enterprise clients that require a more feature rich Google Analytics experience. The paid for service provides increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable un-sampled reports as well as different tools to analyze the data. It also provides dedicated account management that is on call 24/7 and provides service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting.

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13 Sep 2011

Local Gitorious Installation

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I had a nasty run-in recently when I had to deal with user related data from users that are from different geographical locations spread out across the world. I was looking at setting up a collaboration platform for a private group of users and decided to do a local install of Gitorious.

Not coming from a Ruby background I found it tremendously difficult to get it installed and working correctly but eventually after 3 or 4 days I did with Christian Johansen’s instructions and the ubuntu installation instructions. Without these instructions I would have jumped out of a window by now. I was very happy with how well it worked once I had the installation completed though.

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28 Jul 2011

Case Study: Using MongoDb for an E-Commerce Platform

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MongoDb garnered much attention over the last couple of years. It is said to be fast and reliable and that it automates some of the processes that are usually very time consuming and error prone. Adoption seems to be growing steadily as it is being used in more and more high transaction volume systems like Foursquare, Bit.ly and Sourceforge.

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12 May 2011

Book Review: Poke the Box By Seth Godin

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Poke The Box Cover

This was my first attempt at a book of this kind. I must admit that while it was inspiring, there were no earth shattering revelations and one could probably summarize the content of book in a couple of pages. The tone of the book also reminds me of being in an audience with one of those ‘yes..yes..yes’ motivational speakers on stage. I am also having difficulty in understanding the hype and I don’t see why I would need a Poke The Box Handbook to help me implement the lessons in the book.

In all fairness, however, it did succeed in helping me to remember things that have started to fade from memory. Things that are critical to the survival of businesses in the ever changing environments that we find ourselves in. New competitors spring up all around us and technology is advancing at such a tremendous rate. How do we keep our competitive advantage?

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13 Apr 2011

The Open Graph Protocol

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But Facebook is using it?

Open Graph Logo

It seems that there is a new standard, pattern or best practice popping up on an daily basis. Is this really useful or does it just give us another set of hoops to jump through in order to do what we need to.
I recently came across the Opengraph protocol web page and the first sentence on the page mentions “…this is used on Facebook…”. I am sure that it is at this point that a lot of people reading the protocol home page decide that they will also have to use it. I mean if Facebook is doing it them I must as well.

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11 Mar 2011

The Singularity

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The first time I heard the word was on the Sci-Fi channel on one of those in-between-program-fillers. It did not make much sense at the time,  but the word did stick somewhere in the nether reaches of my mind. Fast forward a couple of years and it keeps popping more and more. There is even a 3 year old Singularity University Singularity University based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.

Our CEO at SWAT Jacques Van Niekerk, who is also the CTO of MIH Internet, attended the Singularity Summit in 2010 where topics of discussion were “focused on the Singularity and related converging technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence”. He related some of the highlights of the conference to me and it got me even more interested.

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25 Oct 2010

Microsoft TechEd Africa 2010

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I had the opportunity to attend Microsoft TechEd Africa 2010 that was hosted in Durban, South Africa this year. It is the second time that I attended, the first time being in 2008.

At SWAT we mostly deal with open source technologies but because I have some experience with MS technologies I thought it would be worthwhile to find out what that had to offer.

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20 May 2010

Microsoft StreamInsight

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I went to the Microsoft Tech Days conference 2010 earlier this week. The main focus of the conference was Sharepoint 2010 but there were some other interesting topics covered as well. The one topic that I found very interesting was about StreamInsight. StreamInsight is a new complex event processing (CEP) component that ships with SQL Server 2008 R2.

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