Simon Cozens
Missionary at WEC INTERNATIONAL
Japan
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Cozens is a missionary and veteran freelance programmer based in Japan with 24 years of experience blending software engineering, systems administration, and leadership development. He combines deep expertise in Perl and Unix with hands-on open-source contributions to prominent projects in font tooling and text shaping—Harfbuzz, Google Fonts, fontmake, and Adobe's AFDKO—often tackling back-end, build automation, and QA challenges for complex OpenType workflows. Educated at Oxford (MA Japanese) and All Nations Christian College, he pairs cross-cultural mission work with mentoring and leadership instruction for both non-profit and commercial teams. Notably, his work spans from language VM internals (Parrot/LOLCODE) to automating CJK font build pipelines, reflecting a rare mix of low-level systems skill and practical tooling for designers and engineers.
24 years of coding experience
MA, Japanese, MA, Japanese at University of OxfordBA, Biblical and Intercultural Studies, BA, Biblical and Intercultural Studies at All Nations Christian College
Github Skills (35)
opentype10
c-language10
fonts10
python10
testing10
text-manipulation10
google-font10
fonttools10
c1110
perl10
c1710
font-face10
parrot10
parsing10
build-automation10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
notofonts/noto-cjk
May 2022 - Oct 2022
Noto CJK fonts
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:11 commits, 15 pushes, 8 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily worked on automating and standardizing the build and release process for the Noto CJK fonts project. They created a Python script to perform hotfixes on the fonts, modifying fvar and STAT tables and renaming files according to Google Fonts standards. The user also added versioning and license descriptions to the font metadata, contributing to automated quality checks and compatibility.
noto-cjkfontfontswoff2cjk
google/fonts
Mar 2022 - Jan 2023
Font files available from Google Fonts, and a public issue tracker for all things Google Fonts
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:27 reviews, 317 commits, 659 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Simon contributed to the Google Fonts repository by adding and updating various font descriptions and articles. They added and updated documentation files, including descriptions, articles, and descriptions for new fonts. Their work involved modifying HTML and text files, indicating they are likely involved in the content and potentially the front-end aspects of the project. They also addressed a coding issue in the axis registry, which might indicate some backend knowledge.
google-fontstrackerfontfontswoff
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