About Darlington
Three rules behind every build
Select a rule to read it.
01BSc Computing · UNISA · expected 2027
UNISA is a distance learning university. No campus, no lectures: a syllabus and the expectation that you figure it out. I am working through a BSc in Computing that way, alongside paid work.
Staying taught me what a classroom can’t: how to learn under pressure, without anyone checking in. That habit sits under everything I have built since.
SAA-C03AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AssociateVerify on Credly 
DVA-C02AWS Certified Developer, AssociateVerify on Credly 022022 to 2024 · Westerwick Tech Innovation, Pretoria
At Westerwick I worked alongside senior cloud architects on production AWS environments. VPC subnets stopped being diagrams and became decisions with consequences. I owned IAM audit cycles across several AWS accounts, wrote Bash scripts that turned hour-long tasks into five-minute automations, and sat in post-mortems tracing failures back to assumptions that seemed reasonable at 2pm and catastrophic at 2am.
The lesson: infrastructure is a system that keeps working when nobody is watching. In 2024 I formalised it with two AWS Associate certifications.
03January 2025 onward · Freelance, Pretoria
In January 2025 I went freelance. On your own you are the designer, the developer, the security reviewer, and the person who picks up the phone when something breaks.
Bahati Commodities shows the whole job: a Sandton trading house moved off a website builder onto its own domain, rebuilt as a static Astro site on AWS Amplify defined in CDK, with an enquiry form per division, an assistant on Amazon Bedrock, and the bank details that used to sit on its contact page taken down. One of my early clients was Westerwick itself, where I first learned AWS on the job. Every client project on this site is live. Not a demo.
“Build something real, put it in production, and see what happens.”
Three rules
Conceptual illustration
IAM least-privilege from day one. VPC segmentation before a single instance is running. No long-lived credentials in the AWS access I set up. Security is the first architectural decision, not something added at the end.
In practiceIn my AWS cloud engagements: IAM permission boundaries, SCPs and role assumption with no standing credentials. On client sites: WAF in front, TLS managed by ACM.
TC Energy & LogisticsFreelance Cloud EngineerJan 2025 to Present
Independent · Pretoria, SA
Cloud & Systems Support Engineer2022 to 2024
Westerwick Tech Innovation Pvt Ltd · Pretoria, SA
BSc Computing, University of South Africa (UNISA). Expected Completion: 2027.
Certified: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate (SAA-C03) and AWS Certified Developer, Associate (DVA-C02). In progress: AWS Certified Generative AI Developer, Professional (AIP-C01) and Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
Beyond the CV
Building a tech career from Pretoria means competing on a global stage from day one, and credibility comes from what you ship, not where you are. I learn the way UNISA taught me to, without anyone checking in. When the laptop closes, it is Pretoria’s sunsets, music with eclectic taste, and conversations that make me rethink things I was certain about.
Right now
Next: problems that need depth and breadth. Container orchestration well enough to debug it, not just deploy it, and AI systems built on infrastructure I understand end to end.
