Independent developer · Nelspruit, South Africa
I build mobile apps, websites and the systems behind them — for places where the signal is weak, the nearest help is far, and the thing simply has to work.
Farm Safety, in daily use. Screens use a fictional community.
Latest Projects
I'd rather show you software that's actually in use, or being built module by module for a real business, than a gallery of work nobody ever opened.
Live · Android
A community emergency and check-in app for farming families who live far from help. Every evening, every member confirms they're okay with one tap — and if someone doesn't, the whole valley knows within seconds.
A Windows desktop app, an Android tablet app and a live cloud API that run a working eucalyptus timber depot end to end — goods receiving, invoicing, payroll, an on-site shop and diesel tracking, priced to the depot's own rates.
Live · Website
A portfolio site built to sell rather than just to show: a filterable gallery, an enquiry form that qualifies before it quotes, orders routed by country, and hotlink protection written by hand. Designed, built and photographed by me — which is the short answer to what I can do for someone else's site.
What I do
Small enough to answer the phone myself, disciplined enough that you never have to.
An Android app your people can install directly — no app-store account, no approval queue — that you can fix the same afternoon and have the update on every phone by evening. Built to behave sensibly when the signal drops, because out here it will.
Farm Safety · live
A site that loads on a bad rural connection, costs almost nothing to host, and has no CMS or plugins for you to keep patched. If it needs to take orders or qualify enquiries, it will — that's the harder half and it's the half I actually enjoy. Working with businesses around Nelspruit and across Mpumalanga, and remotely anywhere in South Africa.
A basic static site starts from R6,000. What moves the price from there: how many pages, whether it needs a form or a shop, and whether the words and pictures exist yet. I can shoot the photographs too, so they don't have to come from a stock library.
Sample: johanevert.co.za
The machinery nobody sees and everybody depends on: APIs, databases, push notifications, scheduled jobs, hosting and the deploy process. If you already have something half-built and nobody left to finish it, this is the part I'd be picking up.
Live in production for the Plantation Depot Management System: a Node.js cloud API keeping a Windows desktop app and an Android tablet in sync, with nightly backups, offline capture and 41 automated tests on money that has to be right.
Node · SQLite · cPanel
How I work
Farm Safety is not a demo. If it fails quietly on a Tuesday night, someone doesn't get help. That standard sets how I build everything else.
How it starts
The main reason people don't send the email is not knowing what they're committing to. So: nothing is committed until step three.
Not what it should look like — what job it has to do, and who for. A few sentences is plenty. If you have an existing site or system, say what's wrong with it.
What it would take, roughly what it would cost, and whether I'm actually the right person for it. If an off-the-shelf product does the job for less than I'd charge you, I'll say so.
A fixed scope and a price before any work starts, so there are no surprises in either direction. You deal with me the whole way through — there's nobody else to deal with.
Get in touch
A website, an app, or a system that has to keep running without anyone watching it. I read every message myself and usually reply within a day.