The Business
FASCINATION·works is a software consultancy built on the radical premise that software should, you know, work. I help companies build new things, fix old things, scale the things that need scaling, and occasionally perform last rites on the things that should have been put down years ago.
Whether you need hands-on architecture and development, engineering leadership, AI integration, or someone to stare at your infrastructure until it confesses what's wrong — I bring decades of experience across the full stack, from databases to deployment pipelines to the humans who have to live with all of it.
I've scaled systems, led distributed teams across time zones, built platforms from scratch, and decommissioned the ones that had it coming. I'm as comfortable whiteboarding system design as I am deep in a production incident, and I believe the best consulting relationships are the ones where I eventually make myself unnecessary.
And while I'm a solo practitioner, I'm not a solo act. I have a deep bench of trusted partners — designers, developers, product managers, DevOps engineers, SEO and marketing specialists — that I can pull together into a team shaped exactly to what your project needs. You get the focus of a boutique consultancy with the reach to staff up when the work demands it.
If your codebase needs therapy, your architecture needs an intervention, or you just need someone who's seen enough to know what not to do — let's talk.
The Human
I'm Marc Heiligers. I've been writing software professionally since 1999, which means I've accumulated the kind of scar tissue you can only get from shipping code across three decades and multiple continents.
As CTO of Mad Mimi, I scaled our email marketing platform from 100k emails a day to 40 million — growing the customer base from 5,000 to 250,000 and building a remote engineering team from scratch along the way. That journey ended with an acquisition by GoDaddy in 2014, where I spent the next decade as a Director and Senior Director of Engineering, leading platform teams responsible for Email, CRM, Account Management, Developer Experience, CI/CD, Observability, and other shared services across the company.
I've been a Subject Matter Expert for Ruby and Rails, a founding member of architecture teams, and the kind of person who gets pulled into M&A technical due diligence because apparently I enjoy reading other people's code that much.
Before all that, I ran my own consultancy in South Africa for over a decade, building everything from e-commerce platforms to GIS solutions — picking up whatever technology the problem demanded. The "right tool for the job" isn't a platitude; it's a survival strategy when your client list is that varied.
Community
I organized Rubyfuza, the only regional Ruby conference in Africa, for ten years. We brought in speakers like Aaron Patterson, Sarah Mei, Coraline Ada Ehmke, and Avdi Grimm, introduced Coderetreat with Corey Haines, and RailsBridge with Renée Hendricksen neé De Voursney to South Africa, and built a community that punched well above its weight.
These days I'm deep in the DragonRuby community — building open source tools like dr-input, dr-high_score, and dr-lunr_query, and helping run game jams. The 20 Second Game Jam has grown to over 2,000 participants, and we've even spawned a delightfully absurd sibling: the 20 Million Second Game Jam. Turns out making games in Ruby is a fantastic way to remember why you got into programming in the first place.
When I'm not at a keyboard, I'm probably watching Formula 1, tending to an unreasonable number of fruit trees, or explaining to my cats that they are not, in fact, senior engineers — regardless of how much time they spend sitting on my laptop.