Joseph Van Heerden
Platform Engineer
Western Cape, South Africa
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoseph Van Heerden is a Platform Engineer with nine years of hands-on experience building and operating one of South Africa’s largest web hosting platforms at xneelo. Self-taught from a non-command-line background, he progressed from frontline technical support to architecting automation, CI/CD, and monitoring solutions across thousands of servers using Puppet, Ansible, Bash, Ruby, Jenkins and Zabbix. He has a track record of practical engineering wins—authoring widely used Ruby tooling for abuse mitigation, leading major Debian upgrades, and designing dynamic Zabbix integrations and backup systems for improved recovery. Known as a servant leader, he blends operational rigor with business-minded recommendations and mentoring across teams. Outside work he pursues curiosity-driven hobbies like electronic music and stargazing, reflecting the continuous upskilling that drives his career.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
National Senior Certificate with admission to Bachelors Degree, National Senior Certificate with admission to Bachelors Degree at Monument Park High School
English, Afrikaans
Github Skills (8)
programming-tools9
puppet8
monitor6
zabbix5
snmp5
monitoring4
systemd4
tooling1
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
Josephvh/ip_interrogation_tool
Jul 2019 - Sep 2023
Contributions:2 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 2 months
xneelo/hetzner-needrestart
Nov 2018 - Feb 2025
A puppet module for installing and configuring needrestart
Contributions:1 release, 8 pushes, 3 branches in 6 years 3 months
installingpuppet-moduleneedrestartpuppet
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