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Portfolio: Jehan Singh

Personal Profile

a picture of me

Hello, I'm Jehan.

I'm a software developer at SUSE Linux with a qualification in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before that, I worked as an Electrical Engineer at Ensight Energy Solutions, an energy consumption reduction focussed industrial automation company in South Africa. This portfolio serves to summarise my fields of interest and experience, as well as a list of some of the more notable work I've done in the past. This isn't everything, but if you want a more detailed list, check out my CV in the details box.

I'm interested in a variety of technical fields, with particular interest in systems administration for clusters and multi-user systems and in embedded systems development. My background in systems administration is in Linux administration, both as a user in a personal capacity and from managing multi-user systems, either for small groups of people or, most notably, during the International Super Compute 2019 Student Cluster Competition. My experience with embedded systems is largely academic, as I have completed several university courses on the subject. However, I am presently working on the second version of a scientific recording system for monitoring wildlife. You can read more about both of these in the projects section of this page.

I have a particular interest in supporting technologies, either in terms of allowing other people to complete work more easily by maintaining and streamlining equipment, computer systems and tools, or in the personal capacity by creating assistive tools, especially accessible technology. I try to design tools to be as accessible as possible (for example, most pages of this website are intended to work well with screenreaders or braille displays, this page included).

Employment History

Education & qualifications

Things I have done & made

Here's some things I've worked on or been involved in that I'm proud of. Click on the title of each project for more details;
the CSIR logo
Winning 2019 Student Cluster Competition Date: June 2019

Competed as part of the South African team in the 2019 International Student Cluster Competition in Frankfurt, Germany. The competition involves designing, building, preparing and optimizing real-world supercomputing applications on a cluster while held to a strict power budget. We won against 14 other teams from all over the world, including the United States, China, Singapore and Germany.

In preparation for the competition, we trained with the Centre for High Performance Computing, Dell and the University of Texas, and spent well over six months tuning the cluster and familiarising ourselves with supercomputing systems. This work has given me a good degree of understanding of both optimizing software on resource-constrained systems, and of general practices for high-performance computing.

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the rocky beach where the project is deployed
Penguin image-capture rig Date: May 2019

I was asked to design a raspberry-pi-based recording system for capturing images of penguins on an island, along with RFID tracking tag information and weight data. The system has to operate for several months without any external maintenance or monitoring, and is designed to be self-restarting and robust to faults. This was the subject of my undergraduate final project, and has been deployed on the island.

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the ABSA aliens logo
ABSA Aliens Internship Date: January 2018

Spent a two-week internship at the ABSA Aliens studio working on FieldMap, a prototype android application that can locate a device within a building using pre-existing wi-fi networks. I enlisted two other students to help design the app.

By the end of the internship we were able to locate a device to within 1.5 meters inside the building with no additional location beacons. The original intent of this project was to simplify future work on an assistive application that would allow partially sighted or blind people to find their way around buildings unaided.

Prototype Source Code
the very website your are on right now
This website! Date: 2017-Present

This website, in addition to my blog, runs on my personal server infrastructure, which runs on Digital Ocean Virtual Private Servers. I maintain and update the hosting server, as well as using it for other purposes such as an SSH relay, IRC bouncer, fileserver, email server and general-purpose remote server. All blog content (and indeed, this post) is created with scripts I maintain or by hand.

The site is platform-agnostic and is intentionally designed to be very accessible, rendering correctly even in archaic text browsers or in screenreaders. The entire webpage, with images, is less than 300kB, fully loaded and requires absolutely no javascript execution to function. It would load in about two minutes on even a relatively slow dial-up internet connection, and I pride myself on that.

Blog post about the site

Skills, Abilities and Interests

My skills of interest include: Hobbies and other supplementary work that I pursue include:

Contacting me

I can be reached in the following ways, in decreasing order of preference and/or convenience: