Get to Know the Owner

A Journal of Becoming

the story behind ByTheodore, before it was a company

My name is Sithembiso. Before ByTheodore was a cloud and automation company, Theodore was the story of how I learned to rebuild myself, quietly, intentionally, and piece by piece.

That space wasn't created for perfection, performance, or filters.

It was created for truth.

For the longest time, I carried my experiences in my head: the lessons, the failures, the restarts, the inner work, the creativity, the healing. But as I grew, I realised that memory alone is too fragile to hold a journey as important as becoming. I needed a place to record my life, to witness it, to honour it.

Theodore became that place.

It became a living archive, a documentation of how I was rebuilding six pillars of my life:

Every article, photograph, design, quote, garden update, recipe, book reflection, travel moment, and piece of commentary I published under Theodore came from that project: documenting my life in real time, as it was, not as it "should" be. That writing isn't live on this site anymore, since ByTheodore now exists to talk about cloud platforms and automation, but it's the ground this company was built on.

I still write about the things that move me:

the quiet mornings, the hard lessons, the late-night thoughts,
the creativity that wakes me up, the food that comforts me,
the places that remind me to breathe, the sports that excite me,
the business ideas I test, and the moments that change me.

This page is not a blog.
It's not even really a personal brand.
It's my journal of becoming: a story I'm writing with my life, one day at a time, that happens to have a company attached to it now.

If you're here, reading this, welcome. You're seeing the person behind the company, not just the company. Thank you for that.

The Career Behind It

eight-plus years of hands-on cloud work, before ByTheodore existed as a company

Before ByTheodore, there was five and a half years as a Cloud Support Engineer inside Amazon Web Services itself, troubleshooting production infrastructure for enterprise and SMB customers and serving as subject matter expert for Amazon SNS. From there, cloud data integration work for provincial government departments, then DevOps and cloud engineering building AI-powered platforms and migrating over 500 websites to AWS, and now cloud architecture consulting supporting enterprise migration and modernization work.

• Cloud Architect (Consultant), Ekwantu Consulting, client Standard Bank, May 2026 to present
• DevOps / Cloud Engineer, Big Beard Web Solutions, Aug 2025 to Apr 2026
• Cloud Data Integration Engineer, Office of The Premier, Eastern Cape, Jul 2024 to Jul 2025
• Cloud Support Engineer, Amazon Web Services, Nov 2018 to Apr 2024

BSc Computer Engineering, University of KwaZulu-Natal. AWS certified across Solutions Architect, CloudOps, AI Practitioner, and Cloud Practitioner, plus FinOps Certified Practitioner.