A CTO recently asked me how to convince their CPO and CEO to prioritise paying down technical debt. My answer was to stop calling it that. "Technical debt" is one of the most counterproductive metaphors in our industry, not because the underlying problems aren't real, but because the term itself is actively working against you in every conversation where it matters most.
A CTO recently asked me how to convince their CPO and CEO to prioritise paying down technical debt. My answer was to stop calling it that. "Technical debt" is one of the most counterproductive metaphors in our industry, not because the underlying problems aren't real, but because the term itself is actively working against you in every conversation where it matters most.
Music is my creative outlet. Long ago I learned to play guitar and bass guitar, and since then a passion for electronic music has taken over. I enjoy fusing together elements of electronic, alternative rock and industrial genres. In 2025 I've released three albums; Valley of Subconscious, Mi and Leura. These follow on from the 2019 release of Exit Mesa which was recorded in San Jose and then mixed and mastered in Sydney and on my plane trips between the two. These albums uses a combination of electronic instruments, hardware and software, combined with guitar parts recorded live. I had the pleasure of performing work from this album at a few shows in San Francisco and Oakland.
Music is my creative outlet. Long ago I learned to play guitar and bass guitar, and since then a passion for electronic music has taken over. I enjoy fusing together elements of electronic, alternative rock and industrial genres. In 2025 I've released three albums; Valley of Subconscious, Mi and Leura. These follow on from the 2019 release of Exit Mesa which was recorded in San Jose and then mixed and mastered in Sydney and on my plane trips between the two. These albums uses a combination of electronic instruments, hardware and software, combined with guitar parts recorded live. I had the pleasure of performing work from this album at a few shows in San Francisco and Oakland.
I've been writing software for over 20 years and thoroughly enjoy coding professionally and as a hobby. At Apple I worked extensively with C and Objective-C, and have since picked up Swift for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS development. I've used JavaScript for front-end with React and React Native, and Node.js backend work. More recently I've been using Go for micro services development.
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From starting my own company in Sydney, to leading organisations of engineers and scientists at Apple and Amazon in the US, and recently x15ventures and CBA in Sydney, I've been building and leading teams for over 15 years. I believe technical and people leadership is an exercise in life-long learning. It takes a combination of self-awareness, and awareness of the needs of the individuals, organization and customers to lead in a way that's best for the people, the product and the company.
Astrophotography is using a telescope and a specialized camera to take extremely exposure photos of distant, deep sky objects like nebula and galaxies that are millions of light years away. It's like looking back in time. The images seen here are a glimpse of how a remote part of our universe looked millions of years ago. All images seen here were captured in either San Jose, California or Sydney, Australia from 2015 onward.
Getting started as a software developer requires some research before you can do much, but learning through solving problems will help you become productive and proficient faster...
Rapidly evolving paradigms, languages and technologies create in an innate desire to rewrite old code. Outside of very specific circumstances, the urge to rewrite rather than incrementally improve is an anti-pattern that slows down the pace of delivery and puts the business at risk from subtle logic lost in a rewrite.
The relentless pursuit of simplicity is the discipline to avoid initiatives that are not core to the mission of your business, the dedication to abstract away all complexity from the customer in achieving that mission, and continually divesting all activities that are not central to how you provide value to your customers.
Leveraging a mental models allows us to build software that surprises and delights the user by avoiding the trap of functional yet frustrating software.
We make difficult conversations unnecessarily worse for all parties by delaying, procrastinating and ruminating. Don't delay, but do prepare enough so that you can confidently own the message you're conveying. Remember that everyone in the room is human, and after the meeting follow up to ensure clarity and progress toward the outcome you seek. If handled well, trust will be forged between both parties.
Social Style and similar typologies give you a framework for understanding the personality archetypes that exist in the workplace. From this framework you can strengthen your ability to manage to different styles as well as how to your own style to suit a given situation. Learning about social styles raises awareness of the leadership weaknesses that are apparent in your style.
In Crucial Conversations, the authors introduce the Agree, Build and Compare framework for guiding conversations towards agreement. These are the three modes we can assume as we prepare to respond to someone in a conversation. You agree when something is said that you truly agree with, you build upon statements you agree with but feel the need to add more detail to, and you compare between your view and the other persons view when you disagree.
Structuring an organizing with teams that are assigned ownership of value-drivers (products, features, services), and individuals that are appointed as directly responsible for specific outcomes sets up the foundation for self-organization, empowerment and autonomy. Ownership and accountability are related but crucially different.
Hand-writing your daily, weekly or ad-hoc todo lists introduces a surprisingly effective physical tax that prevents that list growing beyond what is achievable. Two years ago, I switched to hand-writing my daily to-do list and I find it to be one of the most important foundations to keeping me on track and helping to maintain a sense of reality about when I can commit to getting things done. Prior to that I had used countless to-do apps, and before then was trapped in the inbox-as-a-todo-list fallacy.
When I write, I start by defining the single purpose of the document and then I'll write just a few sentences that capture the key points I want to make in the introduction and the three or four supporting paragraphs. These few sentences are encased in square brackets and become the blocked-out structure of the document. Scroll down to see the blocks I used when writing this document. With this framework established, I then write the paragraphs that expand on the blocks one paragraph at a time.
Writing to a fixed-length is an exercise that benefits the author by forcing you to distill your thinking down to the essence of the idea you want to convey. Through this process you become clearer and more confident in your own thinking. The result is a document that is crystal clear, that will be easy for the reader to grasp, and that you can leverage to gain traction for your idea.
Using analog audio components and an ARM Cortex microprocessor, this project combines digital instrument control via MIDI with the gorgeous sounds of legendary analog synthesizers from the 1980s. It's more than just a re-make of any instrument of times gone by. This project is part of an experiment to see if I can build instruments that are opinionated in both sound and user interaction.
Many of the synthesizers available today can create an endless range of sounds, but that comes at a cost to the user. The user has to either be satisfied with the built-in presets, or spend extensive time learning the in-depth sound design principals of the device. For some people, this is what they want. They want a device that they can design their own sound with from scratch. For many though, it's an exercise in frustration when deviating from the presets leaves the user overwhelmed and unable to create a sound they like on their own.
I want to see if I can build instruments that are opinionated: they do one thing, they do it very, very well, and they sound always sound great while still giving the user some controls to find their own sound."
