About

I've spent more than two decades building software, but I've never been particularly interested in staying inside the traditional boundaries of software engineering.

The work I find most interesting moves between the business problem, the product, the software, the architecture, the infrastructure, the economics and the operations. Most hard problems cross several of those at once, and the answer usually depends on seeing how they connect.

Where it started

I built my first computer at 14 and completed a CCNA while I was still at school. I've always wanted to understand how systems work, and software became the main medium for that.

It started with wanting a website: static HTML on GeoCities. Then I wanted it to do more, so I started modifying NewsPro, a Perl CGI news script, and from there moved to the LAMP stack and progressively harder problems.

Most of that early work was for gaming communities. I did some reverse engineering on Quake 3 servers to build a site that showed who was playing on each server and on which map. I wrote IRC scripts, including developing the idea of a pugbot to organise pick-up games for players waiting in a channel. And I built gaming sites: Pantheon, Slash Quit and Premium Gamer.

Premium Gamer is how I got my first job. SpinTel bought it to be their gaming portal and brought me on with it, which is how I ended up learning a whole business at a telco.

The tools have changed since. These days it's AWS, cloud-native systems at high scale, and usage-driven architectures, partly because a founder paying their own cloud bill learns to pay only for what gets used. The instinct hasn't changed: find out how the thing works, then build something on top of it.

What I've done

Over 21 years I've worked across telecommunications, financial services, insurance, retail, advertising, logistics, SaaS and AI, from hands-on engineering through technical leadership and architecture.

At SpinTel I went from software engineer to head of development and architected the systems the business ran on. Since then I've built and rebuilt platforms for startups and large organisations: ShareCover at IAG, where ARR grew from $1m to $4m in a year, and retail media at Coles, supporting $100m a year in revenue. Now I'm building my own products, each as the sole engineer: Atty House, Yak AI, Indy and Emry, all of which have people using them.

The detail, including my full role history, is in my work.

What I'm good at

I'm most useful when a problem is technically difficult, commercially important and not yet neatly defined.

That usually means turning ambiguity into a system someone can build and run. It means finding the smallest architecture that does the job, and simplifying complex architecture when it has outgrown its reasons. It means working across organisational boundaries, where many of the real constraints live, and translating between technical and commercial concerns so that each side can make good decisions. And it means building production systems myself, not only drawing them.

9F

9F is the product and engineering company through which I take on selected commercial work.