Charles Leaven

Biography

Learning by building

Leaven's technical interests began at school through Engineering Graphics and Design. He learned computer-aided drafting early and gravitated toward digital design rather than conventional hand drafting. He later spent time learning under an architect and became increasingly interested in architectural visualisation, three-dimensional modelling and animation.

Between approximately 2012 and 2014, he worked in architectural visualisation, producing animations and rendered fly-throughs for architectural projects. His tools included Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, V-Ray, Lumion and post-production software such as After Effects and Nuke.

Beginning around 2012, Leaven worked through a broad range of computer science courses and course material made available through MIT OpenCourseWare. Python became his primary programming language, alongside MATLAB. His studies extended through differential calculus, linear algebra, computational methods and mathematical models used in engineering and finance.

Computational fluid dynamics became a substantial part of that period of study and experimentation. Leaven used the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid and water-flow simulation work, exploring how mathematical models could reproduce the behaviour of moving fluids. Seeing the same mathematics describe turbulence, flowing water, waves and other observable physical phenomena made the relationship between mathematical abstraction and the natural world particularly tangible.

The same habit of learning through systems would recur in later work. Entering a technical environment meant understanding how its parts related to one another, how the complete system operated and what tools were required to work effectively within it.

Professional work

From mechanical systems to municipal systems

After architectural visualisation, Leaven moved into industrial HVAC. Beginning in a junior field role assisting technicians, he gained practical and administrative exposure to large commercial heating, ventilation and air-conditioning installations and to the sequence through which those systems are installed, commissioned, documented and handed over.

His work on operation and maintenance manuals became a particularly useful window into the industry. Preparing the documentation required understanding the equipment being installed, what each component did, how it was maintained and how it related to the wider system. Through that work, supplier interaction, technicians and exposure to projects, he developed a working understanding of equipment including chillers, heat pumps, cooling towers, cold-water tanks, circulation pumps, actuators, valves, flow meters, control equipment and testing systems.

Industrial air-conditioning consequently became understandable as an integrated mechanical, hydraulic and control system rather than a collection of individual machines. Chillers, heat-transfer equipment, pumps, water circuits, sensors and controls work together so that temperature and environmental conditions can be managed inside offices, hotels, shopping centres and public buildings. The climate control experienced by occupants is the visible result of a much larger technical system operating behind the building.

Later work around civil and municipal infrastructure exposed Leaven to another group of interconnected systems. Although his formal responsibility on many public projects was Community Liaison Officer, the position kept him close to contractors, engineers, technical drawings and active construction. He paid attention to how work was actually executed, including sidewalks built on concrete foundations, haunching and channels, different kerb profiles and classes, culverts, stormwater piping, grading, drainage and the methods used to move and relieve water.

Water reticulation and wastewater treatment became particularly instructive. Systems that are largely invisible in everyday life involve networks of pipes, pumps, tanks and treatment processes. Wastewater must pass through successive stages in which solids and sludge are separated, the remaining water is treated and different tanks and equipment perform specific functions before treated effluent can be safely returned to the wider environment.

Between 2022 and 2025, engineering-related work also took him across all nine South African provinces and into more than one hundred municipalities. His responsibilities included site visits, reviewing technical drawings, preparing and submitting documentation to municipal building inspectorates, interacting with council offices and obtaining property and title information when required.

Civic & public infrastructure

Community liaison and local economic development

From 2017, Leaven worked at various times as a Community Liaison Officer on public infrastructure projects. The role sits between contractor, public authority and host community, helping a project understand local dynamics while helping residents understand and participate in work taking place around them.

His responsibility was primarily community participation, labour facilitation and local project dynamics rather than engineering design. At the same time, the position placed him within active construction environments and gave him sustained exposure to drawings, engineering decisions, construction sequencing and the practical systems being built around him.

Much of his work was centred on Durban's South Durban Basin and later extended into the Upper Highway and Pinetown areas. Projects ranged from roads and stormwater work to major water and wastewater infrastructure. His experience included the Hitachi-led REMIX Water demonstration project at Durban's Central Wastewater Treatment Works and, later, the rehabilitation of the Umbilo Wastewater Treatment Works.

Civic involvement grew naturally out of that work. In Ward 66, Leaven served in structures dealing with economic development, policing, health and municipal coordination. Contemporary local reporting records him as chair of the Ward 66 OSS War Room, head of Economic Development and chair of the CPF Youth Desk.

Employment became a particular focus. Public works could create meaningful short-term opportunities in communities with high unemployment, but only when the processes connecting projects to local labour were organised and visible. Leaven worked on job-seeker databases, local contractor participation, liaison reporting and oversight processes intended to improve that connection.

In February 2020, local reporting recorded that 158 people had secured employment through the Ward 66 job-seeker programme during the preceding year. Across his wider period of community-liaison work, Leaven estimates that he directly facilitated employment opportunities for more than 280 people.

Civic technology

Bluff Projects and Local-Link

By 2019, Leaven was encountering administrative problems through community-liaison work that spreadsheets were becoming increasingly poor at managing. Labour information, project records, reporting and community participation all had to be coordinated across changing public projects.

The situation gave him a practical reason to apply computer science and systems thinking that he had begun studying years earlier. Rather than technology being separate from his civic work, it became a means of addressing problems he had experienced directly.

Working with one of his first developers, Kayla, and investing his own resources, Leaven commissioned a platform that became Bluff Projects. Launched in 2020, it was designed to make local construction projects more visible by publishing information such as project details, allocated budgets, contractors, duration and community employment while also creating a structured way for job seekers and local enterprises to register for opportunities.

The underlying idea was straightforward: residents should be able to see what public projects are taking place around them, what is being spent and what measurable benefit reaches the host community.

After leaving the Bluff, Leaven continued developing the concept. A subsequent development partnership produced Local-Link, a broader civic-technology platform built in React and launched in 2022.

Local-Link also changed his relationship with software. Until then he had often been the person defining the problem, designing the system and working alongside developers. He increasingly moved into implementation himself, using tools including Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, Replit and modern web-development stacks.

Software

Contemporary software development

From 2025, Leaven increasingly focused on software for small businesses. One recurring observation was that large retailers had sophisticated loyalty infrastructure while smaller independent businesses often had little beyond paper cards or isolated tools.

That observation became Loyaltee, a configurable loyalty and customer-engagement platform designed for smaller businesses. Its development brought together product design, web and Android development, backend services, databases, authentication, reporting, cloud infrastructure and practical business workflows.

Today, Leaven works as a contemporary software developer in the practical sense of the term, moving across product design, web and Android applications, backend services, databases, deployment and the tools required to turn an idea into a working product. Software is the current expression of a pattern that has appeared repeatedly in his work: understand the system, identify a practical problem and build something useful around that understanding.

Interests

History, exploration and disciplined learning

Leaven is an extensive reader. His interests include South African and world history, anthropology, economics, geopolitics, science, human behaviour and the history of ideas. He is particularly interested in how societies, institutions and economic systems develop, and in questions that recur across both classical philosophy and modern life.

Travel and exploration form another part of that education. Years spent working across South Africa reinforced an interest in the country's cultural geography and natural landscapes: historic towns, mountains, caves, rivers, coastlines and the historical territories of Southern Africa's peoples.

He also trains in combat sports, including Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and boxing, and has a longstanding interest in hiking and endurance activity.