Gerhard Potgieter
Head Of Software Engineering at Candide
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGerhard Potgieter is a pragmatic engineering leader with 14+ years building high-impact eCommerce and fintech platforms and currently heading software engineering at Candide AI. He scales teams and systems end-to-end—designing remote-first organisations, shipping performance-first architectures, and often stepping into product and code to accelerate outcomes. At Automattic/WooCommerce he led multi-squad orgs that drove measurable lifts (25% conversion, 30% faster time-to-market, 40% load-time reductions) and delivered revenue-critical partner integrations with USPS, FedEx and ShipStation. His open-source contributions include core WooCommerce backend work and a well-used PHP WooCommerce REST API client, reflecting deep practical experience with platform extensibility and test automation. Early in his career he helped pioneer South Africa’s loyalty and digital commerce systems, blending entrepreneurial instincts with enterprise-grade delivery. He brings a culture of ownership, experimentation and cross-functional clarity to platform-scale, product-led growth initiatives.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Information Technology, Programming, Project Management, Information Systems, Software Systems, Information Technology, Programming, Project Management, Information Systems, Software Systems at Cape Peninsula University of Technology
enlgish, Afrikaans
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (18)
woocommerce10
unit-testing10
api-rest10
apidoc10
api-design10
restful-api10
testing10
phpunit10
php10
api10
rest-api10
curl10
automation-testing9
automation9
oauth9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
kloon/WooCommerce-REST-API-Client-Library
Dec 2013 - Jul 2014
A PHP wrapper for the WooCommerce REST API
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & API Developer
Back-end Developer & API DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 17 comments, 21 issues in 7 months
Contributions summary:Gerhard focused on developing a PHP wrapper for the WooCommerce REST API. Their contributions include the initial implementation of the API client, adding functionality for various WooCommerce endpoints such as orders, coupons, and products. They added new endpoints for WC 2.1 and also added support for filtering API calls. The user further improved the client by incorporating error handling for failed cURL calls.
apiwordpressphpwoocommercephp-wrapper
woocommerce/woocommerce
Apr 2012 - Oct 2021
A customizable, open-source ecommerce platform built on WordPress. Build any commerce solution you can imagine.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 releases, 34 reviews, 1576 commits in 9 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Gerhard primarily contributed to the backend and testing aspects of the WooCommerce platform. Their work involved implementing new functionalities related to product imports hosted on servers and enhancing existing features like handling different currency conversions. The user also added unit tests to verify the correctness of implemented features such as coupon functionality, downloadable product permissions and tax imports. Furthermore, they addressed various bug fixes, including fixes to email templates.
ecommercecommercewordpressautomatticphp
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