Dawid Breytenbach

Dawid Breytenbach Pretoria · UTC+2

Team lead and backend engineer, moving into engineering management.

I've been writing code since I was a kid, and doing it for a living since 2009, mostly backend systems for HR, insurance, fuel management and healthcare. For the last four years I've led a team of five at S-Cubed, building integrations on deadlines we usually didn't get to pick.

C# / .NET · Azure · Service Bus · MSSQL · open to remote

A pretty normal week stitched together from real ones

  1. Mon 08:14 A client has been promised a feature that doesn't exist yet.

    It happens. Sales and delivery don't always talk as early as they should. As the lead, I'm the one who breaks the news to the team. As a manager, I'd want to be in that conversation before anything gets promised.

  2. Mon 09:30 The team gets around one screen and works out what it touches and what might break.

    We go through the APIs, the front end and the data model, and figure out where the new thing fits and what has to bend to make room for it. It's the quickest way I've found to get everyone on the same page when there's no time.

  3. Mon 14:00 I go back to management and we decide what gets bumped to make room.

    Something has to give, so I lay it out: this goes in, these move to next sprint, and here's the risk. If nobody makes that call out loud, you pay for it anyway, later, in overtime and bugs.

  4. Tue 22:47 Deployed.

    Yes, it was late. Nobody else was free, so I paired on the fix myself. Nights like this happen. I just don't want them to become a habit.

  5. Wed 09:02 Rolled back. Which is fine, we built it so we could.

    We build releases so they can be reversed without messing up data or clients. So a bad morning is just a rollback and more coffee. If getting it wrong is a disaster, people stop wanting to ship.

  6. Wed 11:15 Turns out it wasn't our code. I tracked it down to infrastructure and sent the infra team what I found.

    Some infrastructure went missing when a partnership between two companies ended suddenly. I dug far enough to show the infra team exactly where it broke, so they could get straight to fixing it instead of starting from zero.

  7. Thu 10:00 We swapped in a new provider at short notice.

    The company ate the extra cost for a few months so clients didn't have to. That wasn't an engineering call, but engineering can make it an easier one: get the options and what they cost in front of the people deciding, fast.

Why management

I've spent my whole career as a developer. I've been in great teams and in teams that fell apart, and it was hardly ever about the process or whatever framework was in fashion that year. I'd like the chance to build a team on purpose, one people want to join and don't want to leave, using the things I've actually seen work.

What it saved rough numbers, workings shown

~300 h / month

of manual work the implementation team no longer does

HR integrations · internal tools and scripts

how I got this

I went looking for the repetitive, soul-crushing stuff people were doing by hand and scripted our way out of it. The number is my estimate of the hours that frees up each month.

8–16 h / week

of manual exports and uploads, gone

Security compliance · freelance, 2026

how I got this

Vulnerability data used to be exported from Nucleus Security and uploaded into Vanta by hand. A service I built does it automatically now. This is the estimated time it saves the client each week.

~R1.3M / year ≈ US$70k

saved per customer

Industrial fuel management · mining and aviation

how I got this

Installing and debugging got a lot simpler, which cut APN costs, networking and security hardware, technician callouts and training time. That holds for most customers who took the device. Dollars at R18.45.

2–3 days / month

one person used to spend checking payslips, per client

HR and payroll integrations · payslip and IRP5 delivery

how I got this

Payslips and IRP5 tax certificates now get generated, cached and sent out automatically. Clients still on the old bulk process needed someone for two or three days a month just to check every payslip was right.

Things I've worked on

WhatsApp HR self-service

S-Cubed · 2022 – now

What changed
Staff who don't work at a desk can apply for leave, submit claims and get their payslips and IRP5 tax certificates on WhatsApp, wherever they are.
Background
A payroll and HR SaaS platform with lots of client companies, and plenty of their staff don't work at a computer.
What we built
A data lake that pulls together data from across the HR platform for every client, with a WhatsApp bot on top for leave, claims, payslips and IRP5s. I designed the data lake and led the build.
Stack
C# / .NET · Azure SQL · Azure Service Bus · containerised APIs

Integration middleware and client integrations

S-Cubed · 2022 – now

What changed
Client HR, payroll and finance systems talk to each other directly, so people stopped carrying data between them by hand.
Background
All of the company's products needed to talk to each other, and big clients wanted their own systems plugged in too: insurers, financial services firms, a restaurant group, a tech distribution group and a provincial health department.
What we built
The middleware that connects all of the company's products (I own its architecture and technical direction), plus REST APIs into third-party payroll, HR and finance systems, including bank-detail verification.
Stack
C# / .NET · REST · Azure Service Bus · Azure SQL · Entra ID · Key Vault · Docker

Network-independent IoT field device

Liquid Automation Systems · 2017 – 2022

What changed
Customers stopped paying for technician callouts and private mobile networks just to keep their field equipment talking. For most of them that's around R1.3M (≈ US$70k) a year.
Background
Fuel management for mines and airfields, with network-controlled equipment on sites all over the world.
What we built
A secure, network-independent device, built with the hardware design team on small industrial computers, that brings all of a site's networked equipment together. I wrote the device software and the comms with the fuel-control hardware.
Stack
C# · industrial computers · serial and Ethernet device comms · RabbitMQ · MSSQL

Nucleus to Vanta vulnerability sync

Freelance · 2026

What changed
The client stopped exporting vulnerability data from Nucleus and uploading it into Vanta by hand, saving an estimated 8 to 16 hours a week.
Background
Vulnerability data lived in Nucleus Security and had to end up in Vanta, and someone was moving it across with manual exports and uploads.
What we built
I designed, built and rolled out a service that pulls assets and findings from every Nucleus project, converts them to Vanta's format and pushes them in. Vanta's rate limits are strict, so it retries, skips duplicates and logs errors along the way. It comes with a simple dashboard.
Stack
ASP.NET Core 9 · SQLite · vanilla JS · Nucleus API · Vanta API

Observability for all our APIs

S-Cubed · 2022 – now

What changed
Developers and support can see what every API is doing in production, and the business can bill pay-per-use customers from real usage data.
Background
Six containerised APIs on Azure, some of them billed per use.
What we built
Telemetry on every API, plus Grafana dashboards for usage, pay-per-use billing, database performance and container health.
Stack
Grafana · API telemetry · Azure SQL · Docker

APIdle: an RPG with no UI

Team side project · 2024 – now

What changed
My team still plays it. Every so often we hold a competition to see who can build the coolest UI on top of it, and entries have ranged from dashboards to full visual front ends. Some devs have little widgets on their desktops that keep ticking the game forward.
Background
We love building cool stuff, and sometimes we just want to have fun doing it. So I made an idle RPG where the whole game is a REST API. No client, no screen.
What we built
You play by calling endpoints to manage characters, parties, inventories, skills and quests. The game doesn't tick while you're away, so writing code to automate your character is how you actually play. I built the backend with separate repository and service layers. Because the game only defines the rules and never the presentation, it grew way past what I planned.
Stack
ASP.NET Core 8 · Entity Framework Core · SQL Server · JWT auth

CowGame: a multiplayer pasture brawl

Team side project · 2024 – 2026

What changed
The office got a lot of lunchtime rivalry out of it. You enter a name, get a cow, move it with WASD or the arrow keys, score points by grazing and shoot arrows at rival cows with the space bar, while a live leaderboard shows who's winning.
Background
It started as a little ASCII screensaver: a C# console app where cows wander a field looking for grass, have calves when they eat and starve when they don't. Over time it turned into a real-time multiplayer browser game.
What we built
The simulation runs on an ASP.NET Core server with a fixed-tick engine and sends game state to every player over WebSockets, and a plain JavaScript canvas client draws it. I pulled the simulation into its own engine-agnostic core library, built a server-authoritative queue for player input and actions, and added test projects for the core, the API and the front end.
Stack
C# · ASP.NET Core · WebSockets · JavaScript canvas

Centralised reporting

Tele-Tech · 2014 – 2015

What changed
Nobody had to stitch Excel sheets together into one report, or wait around for it, anymore.
Background
My first lead role, running the IT and dev staff. Daily financial and governance reports were being put together by hand.
What we built
Automated, centralised reporting, with the data cached so reports were ready when people wanted them.
Stack
MSSQL · automated reporting · database administration

What I've noticed about teams from the dev side

Experience 2009 – now

  1. Apr 2022 – now

    Senior Software Developer / Integration Specialist / Team Lead

    Petros Business Solutions (S-Cubed) · payroll and HR SaaS

  2. 2026

    Freelance Cybersecurity Consultant

    Security automation

  3. Aug 2017 – Apr 2022

    Software Developer

    Liquid Automation Systems · industrial fuel management

  4. May 2015 – Aug 2017

    Software Developer

    Propharm Computer Systems · healthcare software

  5. Mar 2014 – Apr 2015

    Lead Software Developer

    Tele-Tech · led the IT and development staff

  6. Apr 2009 – Feb 2014

    Software Developer

    GoodX Software

MCSE and MCP, CTU (2008) · English and Afrikaans