Front Page

Hey there, and thanks for visiting. This is where I post glimpses of the web development work I do under the umbrella of my sole proprietorship, Digital 49 Web Solutions Co.

Stephen Pienaar, Victoria BC

Structural Engineering meets Web Development

I am a structural engineer and software developer. While I have designed numerous bridges and other structures, most of my career has been around software development in the structural engineering domain. Over the years, my focus has shifted away from desktop software to web development. Can you blame me when there is such an abundance of amazing web technologies available? And now generative AI has grabbed our imagination. We live in the best time in history!

In my web development work, I have built enterprise systems (front-end and back-end) and web APIs. At times, I also fullfilled webmaster duties, getting a lot a enjoyment from extending Joomla and WordPress. More recently, it’s been about building single-page and progressive web applications (PWAs), and also some adventures that have nothing to do with structural engineering: serverless PHP and sniffing out website vulnerabilities.

The Johnson Street Bridge (in the header image above) embodies what excites me in a project — beautiful aesthetics built on sophisticated engineering. And in case you wondered… I had nothing to do the design of the bridge — I simply took the picture because it’s such a cool structure!

What I am working on now

Recent and new projects I am working on:

  • CVE Monitor: Born out of the urgent need to respond to increased frequency of WordPress installations being compromised, I building a plugin for Web Host Manager (WHM) to detect and report on issues published in the Common Vulnerabilites and Exposures (CVE) database. Read more →

  • Centroid Structural: Brand new browser-based and cloud-centric design software for structural engineers. The idea germinated during the pandemic, and I have been eating and sleeping it ever since. Unfortunately, it was not the roaring success I had hoped it would be, but it’s been an amazing learning experience to build a new software as a service (SAAS) business. Read more →
  • Serverless WordPress: This was a very interesting side-project that had nothing to do with structural engineering. I looked at marrying two Internet giants: WordPress and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, I worked on something that would make it easy for web designers to use AWS serverless technologies to host WordPress websites. Think WordPress with super fast performance and scalability, and no worries about server maintenance. It was a complex topic, which is the way I like it. Read more →

And some things are just always brewing in the background:

Contact me

Please reach out to me if you wish to collaborate on a project!