Subject: Who is this guy? | Date: Feb 2026
Senior Backend Engineer at Ablefy (Germany-based SaaS platform). Based in South Africa 🇿🇦. Works primarily on the Rails monolith & microservices — specialising in payment/order fulfilment, tax engine migration, and platform modernisation.
Started in tech youngNope! — David has 20+ years in audio engineering, sound design & music production before software. Made the career switch at age 47. that takes guts
Entry to software was accidental — a project needed natural-sounding concatenation of audio segments for in-store radio adverts. Audio brain → code brain.
Ruby on Rails specialist — loves Rails-native solutions with Hotwire & Turbo. Holds a DevOps Foundation certification. Pragmatic, frameworks-oriented thinker.
Key domains: POFF ticket handling (payment/order fulfilment), Avalara tax engine migration (B2B reverse charge, UK VAT), and platform architecture/modernisation.
Developed an "8-Phase Spec" approach for AI-assisted development and a "Three Sources of Truth" methodology connecting service catalogues, TestRail data, and codebase info.
Strong documentation practices. Values precise, well-sourced information. Concise over verbose. Analyses systems from first principles.
💡 Remember: David's PVH hypothesis likely comes from his audio engineering intuition — signal routing, aux buses, channel separation maps directly to the venting mechanism.
Audio brain → Systems brain
Produces melodic house music 🎶 using VPS Avenger and Serum 2. Also built radiobot-terenio — an automated audio advertising system using Rails 8.1 & SolidQueue. The audio never really left.
20+ years in audio engineering before code. Career switch at age 47 — now 10 years into software (~57 now). Based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
David Teren = audio engineer turned senior backend dev. Rails specialist at Ablefy. Builds with Hotwire, manages complex payment & tax systems, documents everything, still produces melodic house on the weekends, and thinks about software the way a sound engineer routes signals — from first principles.
— "Direct when things aren't right. Pragmatic always."