I'm from Tasmania.1 For fifteen years my work was music: performing, composing, and arranging for ensembles including the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra, the Derwent Symphony Orchestra, and the Hobart Wind Symphony. Arranging is mostly a matter of taking something complicated and deciding what each player actually needs in front of them. That habit stayed.
1Tasmania is the island state south of mainland Australia, and Hobart is its capital. Seen from here, it is the Mainland that sits off the coast.
Eventually I needed a change (and, if I am honest, a bit of warmth), so in January 2012 I went to the Mainland for a holiday. It turned into a career. I joined one of APAC's largest Google Premier Partners as a digital marketing consultant, and that is where I started in web analytics and marketing technology. I have not stopped since.
I grew impatient with the limits of out-of-the-box marketing technology. When a platform could not do what the organisation needed, I built the missing part: integrations with custom business logic, working from first-party data. The building grew with the problems, into applications, APIs and whole sites.
About a decade ago I became fascinated by machine learning. Since then I have designed everything from simple RNNs2 to large-scale Transformers and Mixture of Experts architectures, and put machine learning into web applications. Much of my work now grew out of that: AI orchestration, building harnesses around models, and putting them into the workflows people already have.
2RNN and LSTM models were the interesting end of the field when I started. Then transformers arrived and made them look quaint, which I try not to take personally.
I still write code at the weekend. Agents do more of the typing now, so most weekdays I review far more code than I write. Saturdays are for the old way: an editor, something I don't understand yet, and a pot of tea. Sometimes it's how a JavaScript engine compiles a function. Sometimes it's how a team really uses a tool, compared with how the manual thinks they do. I find the second one just as interesting.
I started NEOBADGER in 2017 and incorporated it in 2023. I am back on the Apple Isle now, in Hobart. Some days the work is strategy, some days it is a debugger, and all of it runs on black tea.3
3No milk, no sugar. About 1,820 cups a year: five a day, with one day off for good behaviour.
