Background

I was born and raised in South Africa. We moved to New Zealand when I was 15 years old and have been living in NZ ever since.

I have always had a keen interest in computers. I started playing games before I was 4 after dad showed me my way around Norton Commander and booting directly into games using pre-made boot disks.

Built on bootstrap

This site is built using the Twitter Bootstrap framework which provides rich styled CSS elements as well as a responsive 940 grid implementation.

You can find out more and also download Twitter Bootstrap here.

Education

I passed 7th form (year 13) in 2003. My highest qualifications were in physics, calculus and statistics.

In 2004 I started my degree in Bachelor of Software Engineering, which is a 4 year course. During the 4 year course, Massey University offered me a slightly different degree, which later replaced their BE Soft Eng degree completely.

I decided that I would change to the new degree which is Bachelor of Information Sciences Joint Major in Software Engineering. In doing this, I was able to graduate a year earlier with an equivalent degree, which enabled me to start my carreer one year earlier.

Sport

Cycling, track and road. Specialising in short track distances like the Match Sprint or Kilometer Time Trial.

Fishing, mostly fly fishing out in the middle of nowhere.

Target Shooting, I enjoy shooting at targets from a good distance. I usually hit!

Squash. I enjoy a good game of squash. I haven't played in any competitions, only social games.

Poker. No Limit Hold'em has been my favorite. I played in a few competitions and done reasonaly well.

Hobbies and Other Interests

Photography could have easily been my full time job. I enjoy taking photos of just about anything. I would have to say though that my favorite is sports photography.

Motor Racing. I enjoy watching F1, World Super Bikes, and Moto GP.

Car audio system design and installation. I'm mostly interested in Sound Quality installations as opposed to just shoving a giant subwoofer in the boot.

Efficiency. I am always trying to make things more efficient in life. Whether is quicker, easier or cheaper, efficiency always has a part in my thinking.

Here are some of the skills I have learnt over time. I rated myself very strictly on these ratings, and followed the following basic way of rating my skills.

• <65% - Some basic knowledge in the skill.
• 66% - 75% - Comfortable to start a new project using the given skill.
• 76% - 85% - Comfortable to assist someone having issues in the given skill.
• 86% - 95% - Consider myself a specialist in the skill.
• 96%+ - Part of the design team to develop the given skill.

Languages

Language	Skill Level
DevOps
Google Apps Scripts
Microsoft T-SQL
Python
C#
VB.Net
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
PHP
MySQL
C++
C
Java
VB 6
Assembler
Prolog
Haskell

Programs

Some of the programs an proficient with.

Program	Skill Level
Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft Office
Google Docs
Adobe Photoshop
Solid Works
Autodesk 3ds Max

Operating Systems

I have been using DOS as my first OS but when '95 came along, I exclusively used Windows until around 2002 when I started playing around with linux based OSs.

I bought my first Mac in 2010 and have been using OSX at home as my main OS since.

Operating System	Skill Level
Microsoft Windows 10
Microsoft Windows 7
Microsoft Windows Server
MacOS
Linux based OSs

Infrastructure Setup

Description	Skill Level
Mikrotik RouterOS
Google Apps Domain
Microsoft IIS
Microsoft Windows Domain Controller
Microsoft DNS Server
Microsoft DHCP
Microsoft SharePoint Server
Apache
PHP
MySQL

Hardware

I'm skilled in assembling computers and setting up basic networks. I'm also skilled in basic electronics. I have been playing around inside computers since I was 12, upgrading my memory from 2MB to 4MB on the old 386

Email

You can email me at

Twitter

See what I'm up to by following @albert_gouws

I'm don't go hardcore with it, but I do send out the occasional tweet.

Instagram

To check out my photo feed, follow albert_gouws on Instagram.

Don't worry, I won't spam too many pictures of my breakfast or pets!

Instacanvas

Check out some of my Instagram shots in this gallery. You can also order canvas prints from there if you see anything you like.

Some of my old time favorites include: Alley Cat, Frogger, Montyzuma's Revenge (Play it here) Sopwith, Grand Prix Circuit

Some of the more recent games I enjoyed: The Hitman series of games, Max Payne, Command and Conquer Generals, Counter-Strike, Age of Empires II