Looking to chat about new gigs, even as an employee.
About
I am a software developer and events organiser based on Wurundjeri country (more widely known as Melbourne, Australia).
I primarily work with web technologies - particularly as a Ruby contractor - and have had the pleasure of helping the talented development teams in a wide range of companies including Buildkite, Culture Amp, and Envato. Lately I've also released Calm Calendar, a tool that brings work/life balance to your calendars.
I've also developed many open-source projects, such as Thinking Sphinx, Gutentag, and Combustion, and organised events including RubyConf AU, Rails Camps, and Trampoline.
Alongside all the code and events, I keep busy cooking pancakes for friends and enjoying the best gelato I can find.
Projects
Work/life balance for your calendars. Calm Calendar allows for synchronisation of events - optionally redacting information - between Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other calendar services.
I inherited this project from the fine crew at Icelab, which was both an integration with a new point-of-sale system, as well as a rewrite (but not redesign) of the entire site. It's now running on Hanami 2, and takes care of the public experience for orders, administration by staff, and processing millions of product updates nightly from various suppliers.
Flying Sphinx is available as an add-on for apps hosted on Heroku, and provides Sphinx and Manticore search servers as a service.
Trampoline was a self-organising event (aka unconference) for those who find the world interesting, have something to offer and share, and have an inquisitive mind.
We would bring together diverse groups to share their ideas and passions informally, crossing disciplines and industries. Over six years, we facilitating 20 events across Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide.
Side Projects
Support Act is a free service that uses your own music streaming data to send you a monthly email with a prompt to support the musicians you love by buying their albums (in whichever format you prefer, physical or digital).
My second time involved in organising RubyConf AU was another fun-filled few days - the main event was held at Melbourne's iconic Forum Theatre.
To encourage the Ruby community to engage beyond code we also included activities such as a pizza-making workshop, rock-climbing, and a First-Nations-led walking tour.
We brought together Rubyists from around Australia and the world for four days of talks and social events, hosted at Federation Square's Deakin Edge theatre in February 2015.
Alongside world-class speakers, we encouraged attendees to connect with their peers at events including small dinner groups, rooftop cinema, cycling and walking tours, and a picnic with food trucks.
Speaking
I was also very lucky to present this talk at RubyNation 2016 (Arlington, VA, USA), Deccan Ruby Conf 2016 (Pune, India) and RubyConf Portugal 2016 (Braga, Portugal).
Work Experience
Through my time as a contractor, I've had the great pleasure of working with the talented developer teams at Buildkite, Black Box Co, Culture Amp, The Conversation, YourGrocer, Envato, Hypertiny/Tito, and more.
For over two years, I helped to co-found and bring to life a social enterprise focused on making mental health care more accessible and acceptable. For a large part of that time I was the sole software-focused member of the team, but particularly worked on back-end development and infrastructure, with a strong eye on security and privacy.
I also got to contribute to shaping both the company culture and the products offered by Limbr, and extremely proud of what we were able to do, how we did it, and the team we put together.
I spent four years working with the passionate team at MBO building a variety of web and desktop solutions with a mixture of technologies that include C# and ASP.NET, Visual Basic 6, Microsoft SQL Server, HTML, CSS, Javascript and XML.
Alongside the more technical side of the role, I also enjoyed participating in the consultative and shared approach the organisation took to business decisions, and the approach to business and team culture here has shaped my understanding of how organisations can be run with compassion and intelligence.