About

Where it started

Casual developer work for the NSW Department of Business and Regional Development while studying — MS Access and Visual Basic forms, 1993. A stint building Macintosh applications for Australian Defence Industries in C++ and FoxPro. Then an honours thesis at the University of Sydney on customising documents for individual readers, which in 1995 was a slightly eccentric thing to care about and is now the entire business model of the web.

Electronic legal publishing at Butterworths followed: ETL pipelines in Omnimark, Perl and Python, pushing structured legal content out to both the web and CD-ROM. That was the first real lesson in structured content, and it stuck.

Eleven years at Boeing

Integrated Logistics, delivering publishing and logistics systems for the F-111, the AP-3C Orion, the 737-based AEW&C and the F/A-18 Hornets. Rule-based expert systems applying FMECA logic over structured datasets for fault classification and risk assessment. SGML and XML publishing pipelines against S1000D and ATA 100/2100. Large Oracle databases full of aircraft health and reliability history, and analytical pipelines over the top of them for long-horizon maintenance planning.

Also where I introduced Agile and Test-Driven Development, by running pilot projects and letting the results make the argument. Demonstrating that something works has always been more persuasive than advocating for it, and it remains the only approach I trust.

The environmental thread

From 2006 to 2012 I ran Climate Action Brisbane — over two hundred posts, with the peak in 2007 when it genuinely looked like something might happen. Policy analysis, event announcements, calls to action, and an ongoing argument with the coal industry. Alongside it, National Enquirer for everything that didn't fit, and Protest Participation as a clearing house for campaigns I would otherwise have forwarded to friends one at a time.

I did IT and communications for Friends of the Earth and helped organise protests. I chaired Boeing Australia's Environment Committee. Almost none of it worked, in the sense that the thing we were trying to prevent is now happening. It was still the correct use of those years, and the archive is still online.

The connection to the engineering is not decorative. Both are about systems whose failure modes are obvious well in advance to anyone willing to read the data, and about how difficult it is to get an organisation to act on that reading.

Lately

Government and enterprise delivery — CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, Department of Human Services, IAG, Flight Centre — and most recently a senior full stack role at CASA on the MyCASA portal: React and C# across a ten-app micro-frontend architecture, where I established the first frontend unit-testing practice and discovered a backend test suite CI had never once executed.

On my own time: a retrieval-augmented generation platform for long-form research, a DistilGPT-2 fine-tuned on my own journals, an AI toolkit for triaging email, and SRDD, a methodology for AI-assisted engineering that treats the specification as the artefact worth round-tripping.

Outside all that

Tae Kwon Do and the gym. Swimming, walking, skiing. Guitar, and a long-standing weakness for live bands in small rooms. A Flickr account going back years, slowly being curated into something presentable.