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● S 26°12′ · E 28°02′ / 2026

CHRIS COUSENS

[ intro ] Software engineer. Thirty years of building things — most of them invisible. This is the corner of the internet I keep for myself.

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01 / About

Who.

I'm Chris. Thirty years of writing software — some of it in front of the people using it, most of it humming in the dark behind something else. Backends. Systems. The occasional product with a name on it.

Durban, 1995: a DOS point-of-sale system, rewritten. The late 90s: Ireland and Scotland, insurance systems for brokers who didn't entirely trust computers. Then an eighteen-month detour into the futures market, where I learnt I'd rather build systems than trust them. Then home. I've 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. What holds my attention is durable software — the kind you can come back to in five years and still understand — and the strange places where engineering bumps into people, money, and the physical world.

This site is not a CV. It's a small act of being human on the internet.

Portrait of Chris Cousens, black and white.
fig. 01 — the author
02 / Voyage

When I was thirteen we were dismasted in the middle of the South Atlantic.

Plymouth → Gibraltar → Madeira → Canaries → Cape Verde → Brazil → Tristan da Cunha → Cape Town · 1980–87
Chricanto under construction in the front garden in Durban.
003 Under construction in the front garden, Durban.
The family in the cockpit aboard Chricanto in the evening.
016 Margaret, me, my father, Candice — in the cockpit.
My mother at the helm leaving Funchal, Madeira.
027 My mother at the helm leaving Funchal for the Canaries.
The children swimming alongside Chricanto in mid-Atlantic.
033 Swimming alongside. Two thousand metres of water beneath.
My mother and me on deck with the jury rig hoisted.
038 The jury rig hoisted. Sixty-seven miles the first day.
Tristan da Cunha from the sea, first sighting.
032 Tristan da Cunha from the sea — first sighting.
Chricanto broken on the rocky shore east of Boatharbour, Tristan.
041 The ignominious end, on the rocks east of Boatharbour.

Three weeks under jury rig. Seven hundred and forty miles to a volcanic island. Five of us and a cat.

read the whole story
03 / Interests

Drawn to.

  1. i.The Drakensberg.
  2. ii.The parkboard. For the tranquility.
  3. iii.Sailing. Seven years aboard as a kid; the rest is somewhere else on this site.
  4. iv.Tennis. Outdoors. Since school.
  5. v.Travel. The more I see, the more I realise how little I've seen.
04 / Made

Things I've built.

Some you've maybe used. Some only the people who needed them ever saw. A few are still mine.

?— yours

Hypervoice

Unwritten, for now.

?— yours

Cover Letter Master

Unwritten, for now.

2020 — 2021— founded

CarLicence

Founded and scaled South Africa's largest vehicle-licence-disc renewal business. The platform, the procedures, the team. Ran through lockdown.

2000 — 2001— for myself

Trade Tracking

Eighteen months as a futures trader produced one durable thing: the software. Every trade tracked, every position computed, every chart drawn. The trading didn't last. The app outlasted it.

05 / Now

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.
06 / Contact

Say something.

Replies are slower than they used to be. They still come.