Cape Town Microservices - Event No. 2

17:30 Venue opens: Drinks, Pizza, and Networking
18:30 First Speaker
19:00 Second Speaker
Q&A and networking until close at 20:30
*Drinks and networking afterwards at The Onyx

The Speakers:
First Speaker - Jarred McGinty
Tech Lead at Electrum - Greenfield or Minefield: Designing Payment Systems that Serve People
Software engineer by day, dreamer by night. Jarred believes code should do more than just function; it should inspire, enable, and empower. As a technical lead at Electrum, he is passionate about building high-performance, resilient systems that drive the future of payments in South Africa.
At the heart of his work lies a simple but powerful question: “How does this affect the average Joe?” This thought experiment continues to shape how he approach system design and technical leadership.
In this talk, he’ll share how applying the microservices architectural style, combined with the power of AWS services, can help you build scalable, fault-tolerant systems that not only meet business goals, but truly serve people.

Second Speaker - Ethan Marrs
Co-founder and CTO at Mindjoy - Stop writing code like It's 2022: building for an agentic future
Ethan Marrs is the co-founder and CTO of Mindjoy, an AI-powered platform for STEM learning used by institutions such as North-West University and Stellenbosch University. A fullstack engineer turned engineering leader, he spends his time working with the team to make improvements to the Mindjoy platform, talking to customers and jumping in wherever needed.
In “Stop writing code like It's 2022,” he lays out pragmatic patterns for embracing agentic software engineering - all while you have paying customers, a roadmap, teammates and production code to maintain. This talk is for anyone interested in adapting their code and workflows in a rapidly changing software environment.