I work at Blackmill. We're an engineering practice consultancy focused on deliberate development. We believe thoughtful engineering practices lead to quality, stability, and elegance. You can learn more about what we do (and hire us!) at https://blackmill.co/
At various times, I've been an engineering manager, a Rubyist, an ecosystem strategist, a startup mentor, a full-time JavaScripter, an IPTV developer, a front-end developer, and a web standards professional. I'm often some combination of all of those. I'm also a habitual starter of community events, such as the long defunct industry demo night, Webjam; Australia's longest running startup meetup (probably), Silicon Beach Australia; and the only Sydney web industry social event held in a tequila bar, Friday at 4.
I'm ex-GitHub, ex-Neo, ex-Microsoft, ex-Ninefold, ex-Atlassian, and ex-News. For Bigpond, I delivered the world’s first Over-The-Top live streaming IPTV service under Widevine DRM. I built key features of major product releases at Atlassian, including developing and open-sourcing the Atlassian UI library. In Sydney, I ran a coworking space called The Workbench and helped organise the Sydney JS meetups.
I went to Sydney’s first Ruby on Rails meet up in 2006 and have been an active member of the Australian Ruby community ever since. I’ve been to roughly 30 Rails Camps run in Australia, New Zealand, and the US. When I lived in New York City, I co-organised Rails Camp USA East Coast 2016.
Before Microsoft, two friends and I spent 2 months doing spikes into the 10 hardest technical problems we saw in making a Gmail-killer. We did not resolve all of them. I still want to build it someday.
Mostly I just want to make beautiful products that solve real problems for people.
