Rohan Strydom · Cape Town · shipping since 2005
Twenty years of systems that still run.
I build applied AI, systems architecture, e-commerce and infrastructure for people who need the thing working on Monday.
Technology is a means, not an end. The problem comes first — the stack follows.
Problems first. Technology second.
Understand the outcome
Before any code: what does working look like, who has to live with it, and what happens if it breaks at 2am.
Pick the smallest thing that works
The elegant path is usually the shortest one you can still maintain in three years, with the team you actually have.
Ship it, then hand it over
In production, documented, and running without me standing behind it. That is the whole job.
Everyone's an “AI expert” now.
I was shipping production systems twenty years before it became a bandwagon. Don't take the bricks' word for it — check the receipts.
Same brand, same copy, same contact form. Each edition of this page was drafted by a different Claude model under my direction — this one included. Six bricks from one box:
Four disciplines, one box of bricks.
Models in production, not in slides.
NLP, computer vision, retrieval pipelines and LLM-backed automation that survives contact with real data — plus the honest conversation about where a rules engine would have been cheaper.
From five-page sites to marketplaces.
Custom builds, headless front ends, payment and ERP integrations, and marketplace platforms that still reconcile at month end. Twenty years across the big content-management and commerce platforms — WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento — and whatever else the problem calls for.
Boring deploys are the goal.
Pipelines, containers and infrastructure-as-code, with monitoring that pages a human only when a human is actually needed. A release nobody has to watch.
Plans your finance team can read.
Integration strategy, API design and system design that still holds three years in — written down, costed, and sequenced so the first phase pays for the second.
Tell me what's broken.
No pitch decks needed — just the problem you're trying to solve and where you want to end up. You'll hear back from me, not a funnel.
hello@innovationtrampoline.com