About Me
Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, I've lived and worked in Chicago, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, where I now reside.
I've worked in the IT industry for the past 25 years, in fields as diverse as embedded automotive software, 3G mobile protocol implementations, systems administration and ISP datacenter deployment management and of course, software development - which is where I spend my time these days. I love travel, having visited over 30 countries at last count, and planning to put a few more under my belt over the next couple of years.
Geek History (Or - "Filling in the gaps in the CV")
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A way back in 1983, which got me hooked on computing. I learned BASIC and simple graphics programming on it, then a few years later picked up a Commodore Amiga 500, which I used to learn more about graphics, and also a few new languages such as ARexx, C and M68k assembly. I wrote a couple of plugins for BBS systems and came up with a few utility programs, mainly for use amongst my friends, and went through the Amiga line, learning about the Internet (and how to make hacks for a few protocols) until finally getting a Win95 box when the OS came out. I took on my first IT-related job fresh out of high school as a sysadmin at a small ISP, and things kicked off from there. Throughout uni I studied subjects as diverse as AI, user interface design and high performance computing, learning to program a few more languages such as C++, Pascal, COBOL, Fortran, Perl and Ada.
Throughout the 90s I picked up a lot of experience with various operating systems (Windows, Netware, FreeBSD and Linux) and also kicked off my experience with databases with MS Access and Foxpro. Development in Java, Perl, PHP and C++ followed. So did the other databases - mSQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
In the naughties I picked up new skills in embedded realtime development in C with RTXC, as well as filling out my database, sysadmin, web development, process and change management and leadership skills.
In the past decade I've taken to mobile and the cloud, working extensively with AWS and its friends on highly scalable web applications and mobile and tablet apps, more recently with a cybersecurity focus.
If you think you could make use of my talents, and are based in the Melbourne area, please feel free to contact me!
I am also reachable on Mastodon if you just want a chat