I'm David Sampson. I build and run platforms, and I coach people on their tech.

I'm a senior DevOps and platform engineer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. I have more than five years of professional experience across 18+ web and platform projects, working in teams that build for fintech, banking, healthcare, retail and education.

Work

Most of my engineering time now goes into production platforms on AWS. I look after a dual-cluster AWS EKS setup (UAT and production): Kubernetes workloads, KEDA autoscaling, Helm and CI/CD pipelines, and the observability stack that tells you when something is wrong (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and Alertmanager). I also do incident response, the unglamorous part of the job that matters most on a bad day. The details are in my project write-ups.

I got here through software. I studied commerce at the University of Pretoria, trained in Java web programming in 2021, and spent several years as a React and full-stack developer before moving into DevOps and platform work. That background still helps: I know what developers need from a platform because I was one.

For team and company work I contract through SuperStack, the DevOps and AWS consultancy I run. Start with an AWS infrastructure review or see SuperStack's DevOps services.

I also build products. Taxzi turns South African bank statements into a tax estimate.

Coaching

Coaching is the other half of what I do. I run my own work with a team of AI assistants and bots, and most business owners I meet lose hours to email, calendars, admin and tools that were never set up properly. In one-on-one sessions we fix that together, on their own accounts.

Why I do this

This site is where I keep it all: my notes, written with AI assistance and updated as I learn, and a tools and lab page that will grow into small experimental tools you can use. My rule for all of it is simple: make it work, make it right, make it fast.