I'm a software engineer based in Sydney, Australia with experience in distributed systems, DevOps, and containerisation.
I worked as a software engineer for CA Technologies while studying Games Development at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. After completing my studies I joined FDM and moved to Sydney. My role there was as a DevOps / Site Reliability Engineering consultant to big businesses in the finance and insurance sectors.
I've been interested in technology since I was a little kid. I was lucky enough to have access to a PC when growing up, and my first experience of computer programming was modifying the video games I was playing. As a teenager I learnt programming in Visual Basic and Java from books and internet tutorials, and for many of my high school assignments I submitted simple computer programs.
I went on to study a Bachelor of Science (Games Development) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Through the course of my studies I learnt about data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), software development methodologies such as Agile and Scrum, databases, computer graphics & 3d modelling, multimedia, and physics. My final capstone project was a game demo developed in the Unity engine, which was presented at PAX Australia in 2019 (along with other student projects).
While studying I took part in Swinburne's industry-based learning program, where I worked at CA Technologies. There I was a developer on the CA Directory product, an X500 / LDAP server for Windows and Unix. My role on the team was primarily to test and maintain the Unix version of the product, which supported many different Linux and Unix-like systems. I automated the procedure to test installation and configuration of the product on Linux systems, and developed a way to automatically test our product on various supported Linux distributions whenever we were ready to release a new version. CA was an early adopter of Docker and Kubernetes, and I was able to contribute a debugging module to Kubernetes, learning how to program in Go along the way.
After I graduated from university, I joined FDM Group as a consultant. After a short training period I moved to Sydney to be placed at a major Australian insurer. I joined the operations team for their CRM system as a DevOps Engineer. While working there I redeveloped the release pipeline, allowing us to release new versions faster and more confidently. I also performed a major database upgrade in the base image for ephemeral testing environments, which reduced costs and provided more accurate tests, as the test database version had diverged from production. FDM then placed me at a major Australian bank, for a short-term role as a Site Reliability Engineer. Although this was a short placement, I was able to have a big impact by automating some maintenence tasks that took a long time to complete manually.
Outside of work, I enjoy playing music. I learnt to play the piano when I was a child, and now regularly play at a local church.
I also enjoy playing football (soccer). I joined a club after moving to Sydney, and in 2023 my team won our division! ⚽🏆