My name is Reid Swan. I’m a software engineer with a handful of years of experience, currently employed with Amazon Web Services in Cape Town where I engineer some of the systems that keep your EC2 instances ticking.
I’ve also previously worked at takealot.com, on the Marketplace team; before that, I was studying Computer Science at the University of Cape Town, where I graduated with a first class honours degree.
Being employed as a software engineer hasn’t dimmed my passion for programming just yet, so I still spend a large amount of my free time working on side projects; you can read about them on the Projects page, and view their source code on my GitHub. While my programming is strongest in backend systems (Python ftw), I’m also a capable frontend programmer, and very much enjoy the fast feedback loop and creative freedom of client-side programming. I’ve taken a few Coursera courses in blockchain as well, and can spin out a Solidity contract or two if need be. I could probably also throw together a weak recommender system using the smattering of knowledge I acquired in varsity, although machine learning is better left to those more expert than me.
Aside from technological pursuits, I’ve been learning to play guitar for a couple of months, a skill I had initially started learning and abandoned towards the end of 2019. I also enjoy cooking and baking immensely (results vary), and I’m learning to speak Swedish on Duolingo! My longest streak sits at over 50 days; I’m seeing how long I can keep that one up. I also spend nearly all my waking moments with music in my ears. I try to keep the Spotify algorithms guessing, but I skew towards alt/indie rock and very mainstream pop.
My ideal gig is working as an engineer in some capacity for Spotify, at their Stockholm office, working on a product I love, combining my love of music with my passion for software engineering at scale. If you’re a Spotify recruiter reading this, don’t hesitate to reach out! I’ve been using and loving the app since it launched in South Africa, and have used the Spotify API to develop my Auxify project (more here).