About Us
About Odderon Phi
Odderon Phi is a small South African technology company building practical, human-focused software.
The company was created as a home for careful technical work: software that solves real problems, respects the people using it, and avoids unnecessary complexity. Odderon Phi is interested in tools that are useful, understandable, and built with discipline, not technology for its own sake.
Our first product, knokkeroo, is a simple check-in companion designed to help people stay lightly connected without turning care into surveillance. It focuses on reassurance, routine, and gentle visibility: a quick knok, a simple status, and a calmer way to notice when someone may need attention.
knokkeroo is intentionally modest in what it claims to do. It is not designed to replace emergency services, family judgement, personal responsibility, or direct human contact. Instead, it supports everyday check-ins with a tool that is simple enough to use regularly and respectful enough not to become intrusive.
Odderon Phi builds carefully, tests thoroughly, and keeps its products deliberately focused. The aim is to create software that reduces friction, provides clarity, and helps people stay connected in ordinary life: calmly, honestly, and without unnecessary noise.
About Charles
Charles is a South African technologist, physicist, QA Lead, and builder with a strong background in scientific thinking, software quality, systems design, and hands-on problem-solving.
He holds an MSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cape Town, a foundation that shaped the way he approaches complex problems: with structure, patience, evidence, and a deep dislike of vague answers. He also has a continuing interest in physics education in schools, particularly in how scientific ideas are taught, understood, and made useful to young learners. That same mindset carries into his technical work, where he moves comfortably between software, testing, automation, data, mobile apps, infrastructure, and carefully designed workflows.
Charles’s perspective has also been shaped by extensive travel through more than 70 countries across six continents. This has given him a practical appreciation for different systems, cultures, constraints, and ways of solving everyday problems — something that quietly informs the way he thinks about people, technology, and usefulness.
Charles works as a QA Lead for an international company, where his professional focus is on quality, reliability, testing discipline, and making sure systems behave as expected in the real world. This background strongly influences how he builds: not only asking whether something works, but whether it is understandable, repeatable, supportable, and properly tested.
He is the founder of Odderon Phi, created as a home for thoughtful technical work and products built with purpose. Its first product, knokkeroo, reflects the way Charles believes technology should behave: useful, calm, human, and honest about what it does.
Charles believes good software should reduce friction, not add noise. It should help people make sense of something, keep track of something, or care for something better than before. The best tools do not need to shout; they simply do their job clearly and reliably.
Outside formal product work, Charles is a deep collector, organiser, and systems thinker: the kind of person who will rebuild a music library, audit a data pipeline, refine a release process, document evidence, improve a workflow, or chase a technical fault until the cause is clear. He brings a similar persistence to cycling and running, where rhythm, endurance, and steady improvement matter as much as speed.
His work is shaped by curiosity, precision, persistence, and a simple standard: make it useful, make it understandable, and make it properly.