Linsen Loots

Linsen Loots is a Cape Town-based software engineer who represented South Africa at the 2003 International Olympiad in Informatics, winning a silver medal. A people-index record lists him as a Software Engineer at 10X Investments in Cape Town, a claim sourced only to that index and not independently confirmed by a primary page. His personal site states he has built for the web for more than two decades and spent about a decade in film and TV production, co-founding Wyrd Films, which produced two short films that screened at the Cannes Film Festival and a 48-episode daily web series.

Notes12

• Quant employment verification: UNRESOLVED. The only employment signal found is an index-only listing (10X Investments, Software Engineer, from Feb 2024), and 10X Investments is a passive/index retirement fund manager rather than a quantitative trading, market-making, hedge-fund, or systematic-trading employer. No past role, internship, or competition-adjacent program at any quantitative finance employer was found in any source; absence of evidence rather than confirmed absence, since his LinkedIn could not be read directly.
• Won a silver medal representing South Africa at IOI 2003 with a total score of 266.9, competing in his second IOI after also being listed for 2004; the silver is his only IOI medal (0 gold, 1 silver, 0 bronze).Aug 1, 2003
• A people-index record lists him as Software Engineer at 10X Investments in Cape Town, with a role start of February 2024 and no end date; this is index-only and not corroborated by a primary 10X page, so current employment rests on the index alone and may be stale.
• 10X Investments (10x.co.za) is a South African retirement/investment manager built around low-fee index-tracking funds (its own site contrasts index tracking vs active management); it is an investment manager, not a hedge fund, market maker, or systematic/algorithmic trading firm.
• Was a Grade 12 pupil at Parel Vallei High School (Somerset West, Cape Town) when he took top honours in a national computer olympiad in 2003, per a Cape Argus story; UCT News lists him as the most experienced member of the SA team.Oct 2, 2003
• His personal site describes building for the web for more than two decades and states he deliberately spent roughly a decade in film and TV production between software roles - a career that is far more film/software than finance.
• Co-founded Wyrd Films, a Cape Town production company whose work included two short films that screened at the Cannes Film Festival and 48 episodes of a daily web series.
• Named alongside Dewet van Rooyen representing Cape Town under the Wyrd Films banner at the 48 Hour Film Project, and travelled to Filmapalooza in Paris in 2018 as Cape Town city winners.Jan 1, 2018
• Author of the Ruby gem mxit-rails (v0.1.0, 2014), described as 'a gem to make creating MXit apps in Rails fast and pleasant', plus the mxit-to-do repo - evidence of sustained Ruby/Rails engineering and an MXit (South African mobile messaging) integration.Jan 1, 2014
• Wrote and directed 'Dissonant' (2021), a short film listed on IMDb and screened via Wyrd Films, indicating an active writer/director role in addition to production.Jan 1, 2021