?— yours
Hypervoice
Copy pending.
CHRIS COUSENS
[ intro ] Software engineer. Three decades of building things — some of it visible, most of it not. A corner of the internet that's mine.
scrollWho.
I'm Chris. I've spent three decades writing software — some of it visible to the people using it, most of it humming behind something else. Backends. Systems. The occasional product with a name on it.
I started in 1995 in Durban, rewriting a DOS point-of-sale system. Spent the late 90s in Ireland and Scotland working on insurance systems for brokers who didn't entirely trust computers. Took an eighteen-month detour into the futures market and discovered I preferred building systems to trusting them. Came home. Have led engineering teams ever since.
I work in C# and a handful of other languages I won't list because lists of languages are boring. I'm interested in durable software — the kind you can come back to in five years and still understand — and in the strange places where engineering bumps into people, money, and the physical world.
When I was thirteen we were dismasted in the middle of the South Atlantic. The longer version is somewhere else on this site.
This site is not a CV. It's a small placeholder for being human on the internet.
Things I'm into.
- i.The Drakensberg.
- ii.The parkboard. For the tranquility.
- iii.Sailing. Seven years aboard a yacht as a kid; the rest is somewhere else on this site.
- iv.Tennis. Outdoors. Since school.
- v.Travel. The more I see, the more I realise how little I've seen.
Things I've built.
Some you might have used. Some only the people who needed them did. A handful are still mine.
?— yours
Cover Letter Master
Copy pending.
2020 — 2021— founded
CarLicence
Founded and scaled what became South Africa's largest vehicle-licence-disc renewal business. Built the platform, the operating procedures, the team. Ran through lockdown.
2000 — 2001— for myself
Trade Tracking
Built it during eighteen months as a futures trader. Tracked every trade, computed positions, drew charts. The trading didn't last. The app outlasted it.
Right now.
A handful of things that are mostly true.
- based
- Johannesburg. Sometimes elsewhere, briefly.
- stack
- Mostly .NET. Some Python. Whatever the work calls for.
- working on
- Engineering. Less code than there used to be. More questions.
- avoiding
- Mostly the news.
Say something.
Replies are slower than they used to be. They still come.