Hey there, I'm Marais. I'm a web developer, "Designer who Codes," and the founder of Cobble Road Labs based in South Africa. I specialize in the design-to-development handoff—which is mostly just a polite way of saying I spend way too long obsessing over high-contrast typography in Figma before remembering I actually have to build the thing. I try my absolute best to turn those prototypes into pixel-perfect frontend without losing my mind in the process.

• Cobble Road Labs: Building out client projects and trying my absolute best to keep scope creep to a minimum.
• Academics: Slowly chipping away at my BSc in Informatics (and questioning my life choices during exam season).
• Side Projects: Tinkering with a few things in the pipeline that I fully intend to finish just as soon as I stop endlessly tweaking their CSS.

• C++ & Qt Framework / PyQt: Writing core logic, building native cross-platform GUIs, and trying to avoid infinite loops in the terminal.
• Databases & Object-Oriented Analysis: Structuring systems properly on paper before I inevitably complicate them in practice.
• Past Survivors: I've already knocked out my business management and human-computer interaction modules—which just means I now understand the exact academic theory behind why a user interface is frustrating.

• Zorin OS: My daily driver, despite the time spent fixing local network bindings.
• Home Servers: Self-hosting Docker on an aging ASRock G31M-S motherboard.
• Next.js & Tailwind: Building decoupled apps that escape the generic template curse.
• DIY Hardware: Modding electronics and building custom timber workspace gear.

You can find the polished projects that actually survived development at maraisroos.co.za, where I conveniently hide my messy commit histories.

TReach out via email or LinkedIn to discuss work, projects, brutal C++ assignments, or why Test cricket is the only format that matters.

For the neat, corporate-friendly timeline of my B2B client work and agency roles, download my full CV here.

I have genuinely lost track of how many times I have rewatched The Office. There is a very high probability that I communicate in Michael Scott quotes more often than is professionally advisable.

Where I spend an unreasonable amount of time obsessing over typography and restrictive palettes, meticulously crafting minimalist interfaces before reality sets in.

  

Where polished design meets reality. I build decoupled apps in React and Next.js, relying on Tailwind and strict TypeScript to keep the codebase predictable before I inevitably break something.

      

Wiring up the plumbing. I use Sanity for headless CMS, Supabase for relational databases, and Resend so the system can actually talk to users.

    

The heavy academic lifting. I use C++ and Python for core logic (triple-checking inputs to avoid terminal loops), and the Qt framework for native GUIs.

    

The final hurdle on my Zorin OS desktop. Git and GitHub keep my version history sane, while Vercel handles deployments—until I forget to clear a build cache.