Hi, I am Gerhard Potgieter, a Software Engineer from Cape Town, South Africa.

I started my career as a Software Engineer after graduating from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology with a Diploma in Information Technology.

From the get-go, I was fascinated with eCommerce and joined a credit card switching company where our team focused on building billing engines, loyalty reward systems, and banking systems for large companies such as Dischem, Bidvest Bank, Pick n Pay, and Opengate, now Stellr.

During my time working on these projects, I still had a lot of interest in the online space and frequented lots of networking events and through these, I got acquainted with the WooThemes/WooCommerce founders.

WooCommerce, the world’s most popular eCommerce platform, was launched in September 2011 and I immediately jumped on board and started learning as much as I can around the platform.

Later that year I launched some of the first commercially available extensions for the platform specifically aimed at the South African market and it was a huge success.

In December 2012 I officially joined the WooCommerce team as an employee working on the world’s most popular eCommerce platform maintaining code, offering support to customers, and building out new extensions.

In May 2015 we got acquired by Automattic Inc, the creators of WordPress.com, and the company whom I still work for to this day.

In all of my time working for WooCommerce, I have gone through several roles and led numerous large projects, from leading, building, running, and maintaining one of the largest WooCommerce eCommerce stores to leading large scaling and performance projects for the WooCommerce eCommerce project. I have also led numerous WooCommerce platform releases which includes one of the most stable WooCommerce platform releases in history.

I still contribute to the WooCommerce eCommerce project regularly and are one of the top 3 contributors.