DevAi

About

2 min read

John Montgomery

I’m John Montgomery. I build software under the YourDesign name from Mossel Bay, South Africa. 22 years of programming, 10+ years of those spent in and around trading systems, and a long stretch of WordPress and WooCommerce work in the middle.

The long arc

I started coding “bots” for a trading company in the early 2000s, before the open-source PHP / MySQL world became the default. By 2004 I was building fully functional CRUD web applications in PHP and MySQL — before WordPress or Drupal had meaningful share. That became freelance work, and the freelance work became yourdesign.co.za, which became 20+ years of custom WordPress and WooCommerce builds for small businesses, brand projects, and agency sub-contracts (Nimue Skin Technology, the Woolworths Mother’s Day campaign via Flume).

The current work is a loop back to where I started. edenfintech-scanner-python is a screening and scoring pipeline for US-listed equities, productised through edenfintech.com. It grew out of the earlier AI playground at devai.co.za — the InvestAI Analyst Platform, a Natural-Language-to-SQL app, a YouTube summariser — which is where I learned my way around agent toolchains (CrewAI, Fabric, PraisonAI) in 2024.

In parallel, I maintain WeCoza 3.0 for an education-sector client in South Africa: a WordPress plugin with most of the operational logic in a 43-table Postgres schema. And I run a knowledge-graph practice on the side — signaltrace-site hosts five OSINT / financial-research case studies, and this CV site uses the same pattern.

How I work

  • Solo or as a lead developer on small teams.
  • Remote, UTC+2 (South African Standard Time).
  • Comfortable with long-running client relationships; current WeCoza engagement has a 14-month paper trail of meetings, PDFs, and PRDs.
  • Bias toward linear, reviewable code and fewer dependencies. Stdlib-only where it fits.
  • Research projects get honest postmortems when they don’t pan out — see Why I publish negative results.

Trading

I trade XAUUSD full-time; most of the quant and AI-review work here grows out of that practice. The fuller story is on the Trading page.

Who I’ve worked with

The Clients & collaborators page lists named relationships and carries three real client testimonials lifted from yourdesign.co.za. References available on request.

Contact

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