Justin Van Der Merwe
Production Geologist at Kumba
South Africa
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJustin Van Der Merwe is a production geologist with 12 years’ experience in exploration, project and structural geology, currently supporting operations at Kumba in South Africa. He combines honours-level academic grounding with hands-on expertise in drill program management, core logging, acQuire database QA/QC and sectional geological interpretation across large iron-ore projects. Justin has led drilling contracts, supervised sampling chains to ensure assay integrity, and translated field data into actionable models using Surpac and core-scanning workflows. His background includes short-term structural studies for feasibility work and practical team leadership—allocating crews, managing budgets and embedding SHEQ practices. Notably, he has contributed technical software-focused improvements to an open-source messaging engine, demonstrating an attention to robustness and data encoding that complements his field-data rigour.
12 years of coding experience
Introduction to Mining Engineering, Mining and Mineral Engineering, Introduction to Mining Engineering, Mining and Mineral Engineering at University of the WitwatersrandBachelor of Science Honours (Bsc Hons), Geology/Earth Science, Bachelor of Science Honours (Bsc Hons), Geology/Earth Science at Stellenbosch University/Universiteit Stellenbosch
English, Afrikaans
Github Skills (8)
clojure10
unit-testing10
event-handling10
python10
xml-parsing10
clojure-cli10
testing10
concurrency9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
praekeltfoundation/vumi
Sep 2013 - Nov 2015
Messaging engine for the delivery of SMS, Star Menu and chat messages to diverse audiences in emerging markets and beyond.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:255 commits, 57 PRs, 82 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Justin focused on improving the functionality of the `mtn_nigeria` transport, specifically enhancing the serialization and deserialization of packets for the XML over TCP protocol. This involved addressing issues with non-ASCII characters and null bytes within the packet bodies, ultimately improving the robustness of the system. They also made adjustments to the testing framework to account for these changes and non-ascii character serialization for more accurate results. The user also added a helpful description to clarify the encoding process for ElementTree.
diverseaudiencessms-messagesmenuchat
justinvdm/chainify-object
Jul 2014 - Jul 2020
make an object's functions chainable
Contributions:19 commits, 7 pushes, 3 tags in 6 years
javascriptkaioszeplinchainabletypescript
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