Hello!

I'm Thane :)

In an ideal world I'd spend the majority of my time and effort making useful things for real people - mainly through engineering software for them, but I'm partial to doing a little woodwork too. The types of challenges I enjoy are usually pretty hard problems in high-uncertainty environments.

Right now I work at Informal Systems on the Collaborative Finance (CoFi) team. We are currently attempting to build out a product in the fintech space that aims to improve businesses' sustainability by reducing their cash flow needs. Previously at Informal I worked on CometBFT - an application-agnostic, distributed state machine replication engine, which is generally used to build blockchain-based applications.

I've worked in a range of different industries and environments, both for myself and for others. I generally prefer to work as part of a team and enjoy "people work" such as coaching, but I still want to remain as technical as possible. My favourite programming languages at present are Rust and Go (with a preference for Rust over Go). I've been trying to tell computers what to do since I was 11 years old in at least 10 different programming languages. I generally care about the human impact of what I'm working on far more than what tech stack's used, but strongly prefer open source tech stacks.

My formal undergraduate education was in electronic engineering, where I focused on DSP-based error correction coding in mobile network communications. After that, in my MBA I focused on entrepreneurship, branding, customer-focused business strategy design, innovation and leadership coaching. I am, however, always learning.

South Africa was my only home, geographically, until 2019, when my partner and I moved to Toronto, Canada. I enjoy the company of small groups of friends, spending time outdoors in nature, playing guitar, admiring (and sometimes creating) art, reading and writing.

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