The development team has expanded very rapidly over the last few months taking in six new members which brings the team total to nine developers. Some of the new members are part time and we also have one vac student joining us for a six week period. Needless to say things are steaming ahead at a rapid pace and we are enjoying the extra contributions to the team effort.

Another Nico

Another Nico has joined the Cell-Life team as of December last year. However, this does not in any way reflect that two Nicos are needed to do the work of one Dirk.

Nico Gevers graduated last year from UCT with an Electrical & Computer engineering degree. He has a keen interest in both the software and hardware aspects of computing. His undergraduate thesis involved designing a microprocessor development board around a Motorola microprocessor. This involved both the hardware design aspect as well as low-level software development to write drivers for the interfaces and the display.

Nico has worked for the Cell-Life team in the past. During the December 2004 vacation completed 10 weeks of vac work at Cell-Life. He started work on J2ME applications for cellphones and worked on the mailing lists (used in distributing the Pulse) as well as an embedded system. During the June 2005 vacation, Nico worked for two weeks predominantly on the Cell-Life website. Now he is back on a more permanent basis.

Simon

A week into January 2006, Simon Kelly was added the development team. Simon holds a BSc (ENG) (Electrical) from the University of Cape Town and is hoping to graduate in June 2006 with an MSc in the same field. Simon joined the team as a Software Engineer after completing development of a software system for the Chemical Engineering department at UCT which formed the majority of his MSc work.

Simon has little experience in the Software engineering field so we look forward to watching him grow over the coming months.

Simon's professional interests include open-source development and web development, while his private interests lean more towards rock climbing and snow boarding.

Melissa

After completing her degree in Geomatics in December, Melissa Loudon joined the development team. Melissa’s honours thesis, titled "Open Source GIS and Mobile Devices for Water Demand Management Information Systems", successfully employed concepts learnt from Cell-Life in a non-health related field, reflecting the potential diversity of application implementations. Melissa looks forward to further development in the Open Source GIS area this year.

Rashid

Rashid Limbada joined the Cell-Life team as a part-time developer in January 2006. Rashid is currently completing a BSc (Eng) in Electrical engineering at UCT with a Computer Science major. He is also busy with a thesis titled “Improving the Power Consumption in ad hoc networks” under the supervision of Professor Chan. He will be graduating in June 2006 and looks forward to the opportunity of joining the Cell-Life team on a full-time basis.

Tshepo

On the 9th of January 2006, Tshepo J Serameng joined Cell-Life for a six week duration of vac work. He will be completing the final year of his (BSc) Electrical and Computer Engineering degree at the University of Cape Town over 2006. He is currently working on the "Cell-Life SMS Messenger" project, the purpose of which is to allow employees at Cell-life to send text messages to their clients via the messenger.

Rory