Tobie is a professionally registered electrical engineer with more than 21 years’ experience in the power delivery business and related industries.

After a successful career in sub-transmission network planning at Eskom, Tobie became a member of the Eskom IDM (Integrated Demand Side Management) program. During his time at IDM Tobie managed the establishment of the Measurement and Verification function and later took ownership of delivering large scale energy and demand savings projects in the industrial and mining sectors.

He also worked in the utility management field before joining a large Consulting management team as Principal Consultant. In his role as Principal Consultant, Tobie was responsible for the management of the Business Analytics and Decision Support Division at EON comprising of 20 consultants and the implementation of various client projects in the utility and infrastructure development environment.

This wide exposure has given Tobie an in-depth insight and extensive experience into the following areas:
• Energy Modelling
• Measurement and Verification
• Renewable Technologies
• Electrical Systems
• Business Strategy
• Complex Capital Plans
• Business Analytics
• Advanced Analytics and Decision Support

Tobie uses Python to do day to day for analyzing large data sets and automating the boring stuff. He is currently tinkering with scraping large useful datasets of the web as well as machine learning algorithms.

Tobie also provides Python courses from time to time as and when needed.

Cancelled Talks:

How I built an automated reporting system using Python for a real business.

Introduction

It is only when one has to solve a real-world business problem that the true power and flexibility of Python is asserted.

Problem Statement

The need was identified to automatically produce more than 20 daily reports. These reports had to be available in HTML as well as PDF formats. Reports had to be mailed to different users depending on the user. The whole process had to be automated and require minimal human interaction once completed.

Talk contents and focus

In this talk, we will discuss how Python can be used to solve the many small problems that had to be solved in the development of the reporting pipeline.

Some of the problems that had to be overcame and their solutions include:

  • interacting with various database types

  • combining and analysis of many different and large energy consumption data sources

  • generating and embedding static plots

  • designing a template system that can output to HTML as well as PDF formats

  • report distribution via email and HTML

  • automation of the pipeline

There were also some lessons learned which will be discussed.