Background

Let's see, where to begin?

I was born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia and spent the first 25 years of my life there. I worked in a few locations, including Chicago, USA and Tokyo, Japan in one of my jobs, before finally pulling up stumps and moving to London, UK for a couple of years.

Upon meeting the love of my life, I moved to Sydney for about 3 years before finally settling in Brisbane and buying a house here - so it looks like this is where I'll be staying for a while!

I'm an all round geek, working in the IT industry (see my CV) for the last 13 years with a love of travel and the outdoors - not that I've experienced much of that lately! At last count I'd travelled to over 30 countries, and plan to put a few more under my belt over the next couple of years.

Geek History

Or - "Filling in the gaps in the CV"

I first started getting into all things geeky around 1983, when Dad brought home our first computer - a Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. After about 6 months of playing games, family friends started giving me computer magazines, which had print outs of code listings for games and little applications written in BASIC in them. I started typing these into the computer and running them, gradually experimenting by changing a line here or there until I discovered ways to make the programs do what I want.

By 1988 I'd done pretty much all I could with the machine, and the family bought me a Commodore Amiga 500, which I used to learn more about graphics, and also a few new languages such as Arexx (an Amiga-specific scripting language) and C (which was to become the basis for my future career). 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 hack its various components) until getting my first PC in 1994. Later on that year, I took on my first IT-related job over the Summer holidays as a Sysadmin with a small ISP, rebel.net.au (which has since shut down). The experience gave me my first taste at Linux and BSD admin and a little kernel hacking.

In 1995 I picked up a scholarship of sorts with Skilled Engineering. They paid my uni tuition and a salary, and in return I was sysadmin and company geek for their South Australian operations. This gave me a lot of experience with various operating systems (Windows, Netware, FreeBSD) and also kicked off my first experience with databases - maintaining and tweaking an MS FoxPro (gulp) application the company built to aid industrial clients with their preventative maintenance processes. I stayed with them in a part time role throughout uni up until 1999.

In the meantime, I worked with a friend for a couple of years at his company I-NeX Systems Management, where I hacked around a lot in Perl, first dabbled in PHP (version 3), and tried out a funky new system called Java (then at version 0.97) to write and support a web-based applet application for a client. It kind of worked, but was a pain in the butt to support, thanks in part to our inexperience, and partly due to Java still being very primitive (Swing didn't even exist until about a year into development, and J2EE, Javabeans, JSPs and the like were years off). Still it got me a feeling for the language which was to become a phenomenon in later years.

My time at I-NeX also got me into open source database technologies. I worked a lot with the database mSQL, which was the most popular application of its type in the open source community. In the background of course, TcX did a little collaboration with Hughes Technologies, and MySQL was born - which naturally I migrated to as soon as it seemed stable enough to work with.

In 1999 I took a break from development work (while still keeping up the admin work with Skilled) and went back to Uni to write an honours thesis on wearable computers and augmented reality computing. During my time there I co-authored one published paper. While the work was interesting and gave me access to a few cool new upcoming technologies, I decided that I was no longer interested in academia and preferred to get a little more hands on.

Such a hands on opportunity came up in 2000, where I joined Motorola and worked on a diverse range of projects, including RLP and LAC protocol implementations for next generation mobile phone infrastructure, and telematics control units for General Motors. If you purchased a GM car in the US from 2001 onward and it's fitted with OnStar (Holden Assist in Australia) - my apologies, I'm responsible for the voice control system. I also worked on integrating Motorola mobile phones with BMW's in-car entertainment systems. The work took me to a range of locations, including Chicago, Tokyo and London, which turned out to be the seed of my next career move.

In late 2002 I took some time off for a backpacking trip and ended up in the UK. By some fluke of chance, I landed in London a couple of days after Yahoo! Europe's head DBA had injured his back. I found a temporary 3 month contract on offer to fill in while sitting at a net cafe in Bayswater and applied. 24 hours later, I was Yahoo!'s newest member.

Thanks to some time swatting up on the latest versions of MySQL in Waterstones on Piccadilly (the best book store in the world IMHO), I managed to solve some longstanding DB issues they'd been having, and my contract got extended, and extended, to about two years - only ending when I decided to return to Oz. My role changed from DBA to software engineer, and I worked on the company's billing systems for their Personals sites and premium mail services (back when expanded email boxes were worth charging for before Gmail killed off that revenue stream).

Having decided to head to Melbourne to look for work, I received a call from an old uni colleague suggesting I go to Sydney instead for a ready made job. I took him up on the offer and joined Unwired as a software engineer, before taking on the role of platform development manager. This had me supervising a small team of engineers as we defined development processes, built network security systems and rolled out a data center presence in Melbourne for our national expansion.

By late 2006 however, Sydney wasn't agreeing with us, so I took the jump to working at home for Einfo, a small startup which had a mission statement of acquiring generic domains and developing web services on them. As well as setting up their data center infrastructure in Sydney, I built two sites for them - DirectoryAustralia.com - a regional b2b directory, and Cars.com.au - an Australian automotive portal, providing a classifieds feature and news and reviews on cars and the automotive industry. Working from home allowed me to move to Brisbane, where we've now bought a house and are planning to stay for a looong time!

As of May 2008, I'll be taking a break from full time work for a bit of study (I'm currently swatting up for my ZCE certification) travel, followed by hopefully sinking my teeth into some new and exciting projects. If you think you could make use of my talents, and are based preferably (but not necessarily) in the Brisbane area, please feel free to contact me!