Our Fynbos family - meet Don

2022-10-26
Donovan ChangfootSoftware engineer

Don is a co-founder and part of the engineering team at Fynbos.

He believes the primary goal at Fynbos is to reduce the friction around making payments.

We want to build technology that is simple and secure by default.

Don's previous work included web and mobile app development for a sports tracking company. After some time he joined the team at Coil where he was first introduced to payment systems through his work on Interledger, and later through Mojaloop. Don also had the pleasure of working with the TigerBeetle team on the first ProtoBeetle and was the initial developer of their Go client.

During this time he had to wrangle (and became something of an expert) with AWSKubernetes and Vault. He spent quite a bit of time grappling with typescript and the node ecosystem, until finally he transitioned to Go where he hasn't looked back :)

Don studied mechanical engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He was part of the team that launched a single stage water and air propelled rocket - setting the world record in that category at 830 metres high.

Check out the video:

If you look carefully you might spot our CTO, Matt, in the video too, he met Don at UCT and they've been building cool stuff together ever since. But more about Matt in a future blog post...

Who's one person you admire?

Michael Crichton - He does quite a bit of research for his books (check out the bibliography at the end of his books) and is able to take all that technical information and turn it into a rapturous adventure that everyone can enjoy.

What's the weirdest fact you know?

Ambergris (mucus from sperm whale) is used in the production of perfume.

Who are 3 people you would want on your zombie apocalypse team?

  • Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson in Zombieland)

  • Clyde Shelton (Gerald Butler in Law abiding citizen)

  • John Wick (Keanu Reeves in John Wick)

Now you know Don! He and the team are building something magical which is nearly ready for general release. You can get on the waitlist to check it out.