Ewald Horn

Freelance Software Developer



This feels like talking about myself too much.

Alas, I have to have some kind of online profile for some of the corporate gigs I take on and LinkedIn isn't always suitable, so, here we are. If you are a potential client, you are welcome to read this to get a bit of a better idea of my background and skills.

Overview

My passion is building business solutions, with a specific focus on startups and entrepreneurs. Over the past two decades, I've been involved in various industries and have constantly refreshed and updated my skills to keep delivering the best solutions I can.

I enjoy solving interesting challenges using Go or JavaScript, usually as part of a project team. In the past, I've worked in Web Assembly, Rust, Zig, Python, Flutter, Dart, C#, F#, Xamarin (Forms and Native), NativeScript, Java (ME, SE, EE), Scala, Swift, Kotlin, C, C++, PHP, HTML5, Delphi, Objective-C, TypeScript and even some Cobol... Yes, it's a lot of languages, but it's been a long a career with oh so many, many spectacular bugs.

As a firm believer in the iterative development process, I find that I add the greatest value when I fully understand the problems I'm trying to solve. Part of my work involves coaching startup founders and helping them deliver prototypes and proof of concept builds to secure funding. The lessons learned during these phases can then be applied when building an MVP or production application, saving time and effort in the long run.

From around 2012, I spent almost all my time building mobile applications on iOS and Android. I started out using Appcelerator and quickly moved into Objective-C and Java. Still later, I added Swift and Kotlin as well as Xamarin to my portfolio. The last few apps I did used Kotlin Native, Jetpack Compose and of course SwiftUI. For a couple of years now I've found myself usually working on the API's and services required, as that has become challenging to find someone for.

In the modern mobile world of fantastic technologies like React Native and Flutter, it's often more difficult to find someone to build the mobile friendly API's required by these apps than getting the apps themselves built. I've naturally migrated towards this part of the development world and I really enjoy it. It is quite nice to be able to use my mobile knowledge to build easy to consume API's for the rest of the team.

My ideal client understands remote and asynchronous work and values output and results more than how many hours you spent staring at your monitor. I work the best in small teams with good communication and a clear sense of ownership. The optimal team setup for me would include a business analyst, a UI specialist and some kind of quality control person, along with of course me and one or two other developers if needed. Larger teams would need some more structure and people, but communication can then become a bottleneck if not properly managed.

Previous Projects

Here's a short list of the type of things I've been involved with over the years.



Alright, you can stop here

What follows is a section containing a hopefully not too out of date list of the courses and certifications etc. that I've done over the last while. This exists to help me keep track!

As a freelance software developer, I often end up being the only developer on startup projects. This naturally requires me to work full-stack, and then some. Hence the eclectic mix of front-end, back-end, mobile and other assorted courses I've done.

Honestly, it's all boring stuff, so you can stop here and not waste your time.



Courses and Certificates

I spend a lot of time learning and improving my skills, usually with online courses. Some of these courses are for personal enrichment, others to be able to solve a particular challenge for a client.

One of the questions I often get asked is why there are so many courses that I do that is for things I should already know. For example, I did a SQL Fundamentals course in 2019. Well, things change, skills rust and I find it useful to refresh and update my foundation knowledge from time to time.

Ultimately, the goal is to be able to provide the right solution to clients, which is hard to do if you have not bothered to learn about the changes that have occurred in the industry over the last while.

2KO International

AWS

Coursera

Data Camp

FreeCodeCamp

Google Analytics Academy

Google Developers

Great Learning

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

LinkedIn Learning

Microsoft Learn

Microsoft Virtual Academy

National Archives

PluralSight

SoloLearn

Stone River eLearning

Triplebyte

Udemy

Social Media Links



Not so secret secrets

Sometimes, I build stuff that are just small experiments and I'll list them here for folks to find.

These are experiments and they are as likely to fail as they are to work. May the bytes forever be in your favour.