Fen Faure
fenfaure@gmail.com · github.com/fenmade · City of Johannesburg
Profile
Programming since 2005; professional software engineering since 2023. I build low-cost, maintainable systems that users love. Technical depth across the stack with particular expertise in Python and JavaScript; leadership experience from individual contribution to team direction. Comfortable adapting to any technology stack.
Experience
WeThinkCode_ · Software Engineer · July 2023 – Present
LMS — Team Lead
Led engineering of the organization's core differentiating product: a large Python codebase deployed on AWS. Scope included infrastructure, reliability, and team technical direction.
Student Portal — Team Lead
Led a cross-functional team of two to design and ship a React-based performance tracking interface. Focused on UI/UX quality and mentoring junior engineers. Primary contribution was leadership and process — gained perspective on how software quality emerges from team dynamics, not individual skill alone.
Embark — Product Engineer
Designed, built, deployed, and handed off a browser-native curriculum platform serving 10,000+ students. Wrote the curriculum and the software. Reduced per-student delivery cost from 100 ZAR to 1 ZAR. Used React with Pyodide to execute Python in-browser, eliminating server-side execution infrastructure. System remains in production.
Selected Projects
Pond
A programming language inspired by C with a unifying compiler architecture. Explores bidirectional reasoning between emulation and compilation.
Synths
Audio synthesis tools. Self-taught DSP: filter design, sampling theory, signal processing pipelines.
The Players
AI opponents for abstract strategy games, implemented in C. Adapted techniques from chess engine research.
Fenbot
Markov chain conversational agent trained on 1M+ messages. Independently developed approaches later formalized as tokenization and state space modeling. Implemented in PHP.