About

Work Experience

• Fractional CTO / Product Owner / Lead Engineer, Contracting

  Apr, 2023 - Feb, 202410 months

  Startup Adviser, fractional CTO and Lead Engineer, specialising in 0-day startups. I provide strategic guidance, lead & build MVP Development, and offer general, technical, strategic and management expertise to help startups succeed from day one

  • Worked with some of Australia's most exciting emerging startups

  • Took products from ideation to market through story mapping, MVP development, GTM Strategy and market validation

  • Lead, Managed & Mentored teams of 3-6

  • Ruby/ROR/Python/Node/ChatGPT API/Serverless/AWS

• Entrepreneur in Residence, Antler

  May, 2022 - Apr, 202311 months

  Joined the program to explore nurturing my own startup aka 'The Practical MBA', learnt many valuable skills along the way from ideation, taking concepts to market (0 to 1), market validation, business models, product/market fit to capital raising and pitching to committees

  • Developed strong problem-solving and critical thinking skills by identifying and addressing challenges facing early-stage startups

  • Gained experience in business strategy, market analysis, and financial planning to help startups develop sustainable and scalable business models

  • Built a diverse and global network of entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts to share insights and best practices and create new opportunities for collaboration

  • Honed skills in pitching and presenting to effectively communicate complex ideas and value propositions to investors, customers, and other stakeholders

  • Developed a deep understanding of emerging technologies and trends and how they are reshaping industries and markets, enabling more informed decision-making and innovative thinking

• Founder / CTO, Will I Wake

  Mar, 2021 - Feb, 202211 months

  • Ran multiple campaigns to evaluate problem/solution fit

  • Built a landing page & MVP (Ruby on Rails/React/Terraform/AWS) to evaluate product/market fit)

  • Pitched to Antler & was accepted into the program

• Career Break, 

  Apr, 2020 - Dec, 20211 year 8 months

  Took a career break post COVID to re-evaluate my career, growth opportunities & pursue a personal goal of travelling around Australia with the only thing planned to stay in each capital city for around 2-3 months. Completed an entire lap of the country travelling around 30,000KM, An amazingly rewarding experience

  • Invested in personal growth, self-reflection, and self-care

  • Investigated undertaking an MBA but decided against it in favour of a more hands-on approach to learning by doing

• Engineering Manager, GOAT

  Mar, 2019 - Apr, 20201 year 1 month

  • Lead & managed a team of 12 consisting of Product/iOS/Android/Backend & Mobile Engineers (Ruby/ROR/Go/Swift/Kotlin) both co-located and remote, building and successfully delivering on alias (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1467090341) a brand new seller focused app & brand for GOAT

  • Levelled up multiple employee's through goal setting/coaching and the introduction of a career matrix to add more structure/conversation points around the journey

• Solutions Architect, Travelport Locomote

  Jun, 2017 - Jul, 20181 year 1 month

  • Pragmatically defined & owned the product technology roadmap and provided architectural direction to teams through deep collaboration with product owners, QA, teams & other stakeholders, roadmap artefacts were created in the form of user stories & through visual language eg. UML

  • Championed key initiatives to increase release predictability & reliability, reducing cycle time, reducing escaped defects through collaboration with multiple facets of the business such as management, support, sales & engineering

  • Selected and evangelised appropriate design and integration patterns with first/third parties & processes to help scale the business through contribution to the organisation's wiki, lightning talks and pair programming / mentoring resulting in improvements to organisations engineering conceptual integrity & reduced cycle time for user stories

  • Developed technical tools to aid in story visibility through the development pipeline & defect tracking/resolution

  • Engaged in Web App & Network Security, PEN Testing & PCI Compliance

  • Maintained a suite of apps hosting in AWS using Configuration Management (Ansible/Chef) & PaaS such as Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku and containerisation using Docker

  • Orchestrated a zero downtime organisation wide migration to Heroku (PaaS) from Ansible/Chef managed infrastructure, this resulted in a reduced operational overhead on the engineering team & direct cost saving's through a reduction in hosting costs

  • Provided direction/planning to engineering teams and collaborated with third party vendors in order to meet PCI / GDPR compliance

• Engineering Manager and Technical Product Owner, Travelport Locomote

  Jun, 2014 - Jun, 20173 years

  • Built, hired & lead scrum teams of 6-8 as a servant leader both domestically and remotely, worked closely with recruiters both locally & abroad during a growth period of 20-to 50 employee's

  • Worked closely with clients/customers to ensure customer requirements were converted into high quality development artefacts for teams

  • Delivered on the product roadmap & on-boarded some of Australia's biggest universities

  • Formulated & articulated the vision and goals to scrum teams to ensure alignment/shared understanding through story mapping sessions, five whys, kick off's, pair programming & mentoring

  • Engaged in application performance, load & stress testing and implemented appropriate infrastructure and processes to support a 10x growth in on-boarded companies

  • Implemented/improved many technical and operational procedures and processes to facilitate scaling the business such as streamlining/automating the support, implementation & development pipelines with a constant emphasis on continuous improvement

  • Improved backlog priority transparency & stability through sequencing using a very simple cost/value weighting, it was previously ordered via the HiPPO method which wasn't scaling

  • Identified key unique selling points, key features and competitive advantages through user, sales feedback and competitor analysis within the market and crafted user stories to guide product development

  • Guided product decisions through empiricism primarily through the build, measure lean feedback loop

  • Advocated a product strategy of saying "no" more than "yes" on the back of maintaining integrity of our product vision

  • Supported and collaborated with third parties through due diligence as part of an acquisition

  • Engaged in annual & successful PEN Test & Security audits of the application for one of Australia's leading banks

• Engineering Team Lead, Travelport Locomote

  Jul, 2012 - Jun, 20141 year 11 months

  • Built & Lead a scrum team of 6-8 both domestically and remotely

  • Guided team development efforts towards many successful project deliveries

  • Provided technical leadership to teammates through individual contribution, coaching and mentorship

  • On boarded & Collaborated with some of Australia's leading banks and universities

  • Built & Nurtured a positive & much lauded working culture

  • Implemented/maintained best practice Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Test Automation & Deployment pipelines

• Adviser, Revelthat

  Mar, 2017 - Jul, 20181 year 4 months

  • Provided guidance on product strategy, ownership, and best practices

  • Made key individual contributions (IC) with a focus on Django/Python

  • Implemented and optimised development (CI/CD) pipelines for increased efficiency

  • Advised on and assisted with the hiring and recruiting process

• Lead Senior Engineer, Alliance Software

  Mar, 2006 - May, 20126 years 2 months

  • Lead, hired and mentored other software engineers

  • Collaborated & mentored Senior Developers, Juniors & Contractors and provided technical advice and direction to management

  • Delivered E2E & supported over 20 projects with Ruby on Rails/Zend Framework

  • Built a custom Zend Framework based Video Delivery platform that was pitched as a corporate Video Delivery Platform & CMS, this integrated with third party video platforms such as Brightcove and BitsOnTheRun. Features such as channel creation, pre/post roll advertisement injection, video scheduling and search by time based video meta data, it was later sold to a USA based company

  • Phased out a legacy custom built PHP CMS and coordinated / co-developed a complete rewrite of the CMS using Zend Framework which is now in use in a multitude of sites

  • Supported and maintained a high traffic legacy CMS based site for a popular travel company. Routinely dealt directly with the client and collaborated with their hosting company, their IT department and key stake holders to achieve great project outcomes. Implemented solutions for integration with an internal File Maker Database, Online Trip Payments & Online Trip Bookings* Lead, hired and mentored other software engineers * Collaborated & mentored Senior Developers, Juniors & Contractors and provided technical advice and direction to management * Delivered E2E & supported over 20 projects with Rails/Zend Framework * Built a custom Zend Framework based Video Delivery platform that was pitched as a corporate Video Delivery Platform & CMS, this integrated with third party video platforms such as Brightcove and BitsOnTheRun. Features such as channel creation, pre/post roll advertisement injection, video scheduling and search by time based video meta data, it was later sold to a USA based company. * Phased out a legacy custom built PHP CMS and coordinated / co-developed a complete rewrite of the CMS using Zend Framework which is now in use in a multitude of sites. * Supported and maintained a high traffic legacy CMS based site for a popular travel company. Routinely dealt directly with the client and collaborated with their hosting company, their IT department and key stake holders to achieve great project outcomes. Implemented solutions for integration with an internal File Maker Database, Online Trip Payments & Online Trip Bookings

• Co-Owner, Boche Collection

  Mar, 2006 - May, 20126 years 2 months

  • Created & maintained a custom Ruby on Rails based online e-commerce platform for clothing retail, stock management, invoice management & CRM

• Senior Engineer, Revium

  Mar, 2008 - Dec, 20089 months

  • Worked in a team developing a complex advertisement builder for Australia Post using a custom in-house CMS

• Junior Web Developer, Bigdog Software

  Feb, 2005 - Mar, 20061 year 1 month

  • Worked on a variety of intranet based solutions for architectural firms. Features such as project estimation / tracking, time sheet management and reporting amongst others

  • Software & Hardware support for clients

• Junior Web Developer, Swinburne University

  Feb, 2002 - Aug, 20053 years 6 months

  • Developed a training scheduling system for the CFA and a local intranet based version of that scheduling system for the ESTI unit

  • Developed an automated solution to map students exemptions from various courses

  • Developed and maintained the ESTI units website

  • Assisted & Supported the units IT operations

Projects Experience

• Free exercise DB, owner

  Mar, 2023 - Jan, 202410 months

  Open Public Domain Exercise Dataset in JSON format, over 800 exercises with a browsable public searchable front-end

• zsh ansimotd, owner

  Mar, 2023 - Jan, 202410 months

  a zsh-plugin to display old skool ansi & ascii bbs art on logon

• osx-colors, owner

  Mar, 2021 - Jan, 20242 years 10 months

  Sane colour handling of osx's accent and highlight colour from the commandline

Skills

Education

Interests