About

I’m Jacques Murray — a software engineer, systems practitioner, and the Managing Director of Lagari Group (Pty) Ltd, based in Centurion, Gauteng, South Africa.

With over 17 years in the technology sector, my work spans enterprise systems architecture, cloud infrastructure, full-stack software development, and technical team leadership. Over that time, I have engineered high-availability server farms (managing over 200 servers across multi-farm topologies for MTN at Integr8 IT), delivered enterprise systems for the South African National Treasury, led engineering teams building high-volume e-commerce platforms as Development Team Lead and IT Manager at Xiquel Group, and established Lagari Group to build software, automation pipelines, and digital services.

Technical Philosophy & Focus

I build durable, well-architected systems designed for real-world reliability and structural integrity:

• Structural Resilience & Security Hardening: Beyond shipping functional code, I evaluate architectures from an offensive perspective. Active engagement in penetration testing and bug bounty hunting informs how I design systems: mapping attack surfaces, enforcing query-level authorization to eliminate BOLA/IDOR vulnerabilities, securing token lifecycles, and validating data schemas strictly at system boundaries.
• The Systems Underneath the Systems: My foundational expertise centers on the Microsoft enterprise ecosystem (.NET Core 8, .NET Aspire, C#, Microsoft SharePoint, Azure), complemented by polyglot engineering in Go, Python, Rust, TypeScript, and PHP. Across these stacks, I focus on core infrastructure primitives: distributed task queues, token-bucket rate limiters, multi-tier caching architectures, and resilient retry logic.
• Mobile & Native Engineering: I build mobile applications across native Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, Glance) and cross-platform stacks (Flutter & Dart, React Native), focusing on offline-first state machines, clean background sync, and direct user utility.
• Cloud Infrastructure & Homelab Operations: I architect containerized environments across Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Linode, and DigitalOcean with automated CI/CD and proactive alerting. In my homelab, I run headless ARM infrastructure (Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe SSD via M.2 HAT on Docker CE), evaluating self-hosted services, local LLM tooling, and autonomous agent workflows.
• Zero-Memory Engineering: Human memory and continuous willpower are unreliable operational dependencies. I apply systems-engineering principles to cognitive workflows, replacing manual effort and reminders with automated, friction-free architectures that do not depend on human recall.

Beyond the Code

Outside of enterprise engineering and infrastructure architecture:

• Writing & Published Works: I author practical, non-fiction technical and systems books. My published works on Amazon Kindle include The ADHD Adult’s Bill-Paying System That Actually Sticks (a zero-memory financial operating architecture for neurodivergent adults), Python Programming: Your Coding Superpower (a hands-on automation guide for beginner coders), Prompt Engineering for AI LLMs: A Beginner’s Guide (an engineering playbook for the P-T-C-O prompting framework, reasoning scaffolds, and autonomous agent orchestration), and PowerShell for IT Support: From Zero to Enterprise Automation (a practical field manual for helpdesk technicians and sysadmins moving from manual GUI clicking to enterprise automation pipelines).
• Visual Arts & Photography: I hold a formal Diploma in Photography. The discipline of deliberate framing, focal discipline, and composition directly informs how I approach user interface hierarchy and clean software modularity.
• Interests: Gaming, tracking cybersecurity research and vulnerability disclosures, homelab engineering, and writing essays on systems design, focus, and technology.

You can review my career history and credentials on my Resume , browse published titles on Books & Publications , read technical and personal essays on the Blog , or connect via GitHub and LinkedIn .