Laravel Intermediate

Mark is the Managing Director of Leading Edge Business Solutions. Mark has been programming since the age of 10 when he wrote his fist Basic Program on an Apple IIe. He has always been passionate about computers and education and started tutoring matric students in 1994. Mark has been training advanced Linux courses, installing, configuring and maintaining Linux servers since November 1999. In 2002 Mark began training Perl courses. Mark was among the first group to write the LPI level 2 Certification in South Africa in 2004. Since March 2006 Mark has been training PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. Since 2009 Mark has started training Java and Python.

Mark's formal qualifications include:

Bsc (Engineering) Electrical

Institution: University of the Witwatersrand.

Final Subjects IncludedComputer Engineering

Certification: Level 2 Certification

Institution: Linux Professional Institute

I studied computer engineering at Tshwane University of Technology. I then joined a web development company in 1999 where I began my journey in back-end web development. I had to learn to work with several web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Being a back-end developer also meant learning all about databases and how to interact with them using SQL. I also became very familiar with setting up Linux servers for website hosting.

Around 2001 our company moved into instructor led training where I started training mainly corporate companies in all the technologies I had learnt. I joined Leading Training in 2011 with a primary focus on technical training and managing the IT infrastructure. In the last 5 years my main focus has shifted back to my roots of back-end web development. This now involves writing web-based applications to automate business workflows. For this I mainly make use of a PHP framework called Laravel and a library called Laravel Livewire.

I am very active in my church in all things technical. I enjoy mixing live sound and assisting with the live streaming of services.