Florian Aschenbrenner will be holding a workshop on how to ensure your infrastructure can grow with your business. It’s something, he says, that not many people think a lot about.

“You start a business, write an app, but you don’t think about how it will handle spikes or increased traffic a few months down the line. For most people it’s about scaling the business not the infrastructure – and that’s what I’ll focus on.”

Aschenbrenner says he will mostly focus on the ecommerce world – it’s where his experience lies. “I’ve worked with Magento, and built similar systems over the past few years that I will be talking about. My 10+ years experience in IT has been mostly about scaling, in one form or another. I’ve had the chance to see a lot of companies grow and had the responsibility to make sure that the systems in use are able to cope with these expansions. I’ve been an advocate of secure, well-documented and user-friendly systems.”

This is his first Tech4Africa, he says. Having worked with founder Gareth Knight over the years, he got interested in the event. “With the topic, and with Africa being an emerging market and more and more start ups coming out of SA… The earlier people start talking about the things you have to do to make a business and its infrastructure scalable the better, and what I’ve learned might be of use to people,” he says.

“I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of people – networking – it’s great to get a lot of viewpoints and learn new things. You might have been working on one thing and missed a lot of other things I can add to my knowledge-base and learn better. It’s great to have a talented pool of people and speakers and be able to see how they doing things.”