Long before I cared about DOM trees or API endpoints, my career started in the music industry. I spent six years as an audio engineer, which is essentially system architecture with much louder feedback loops. While other engineers were deep in music theory, I was the gearhead of the studio, obsessing over signal flow, mastering ProTools, and figuring out how to string together pre-amps, EQs and compressors to bring the artist's vision to life. It was a masterclass in taking a highly abstract, emotional requirement (like make a snare drum sound "more purple") and translating it into a concrete technical setup.

A six-month working-holiday in British Columbia, Canada, quickly turned into a much longer pivot. The abundance of BC's snowboarding, biking, and climbing had me hooked, I was at home in the mountains. The chase eventually led me to SilverStar Ski Resort, setting the stage for the next chapter.

What happens when a mid-twenties Aussie on a working holiday takes over a struggling restaurant on a Canadian ski-hill? He turns it around and builds an offshoot catering and events business. Obvious, right? 1609 Restaurant & Lounge was an eight-year masterclass in leadership and delivering under extreme pressure. I inherited a dated venue with a poor reputation and completely overhauled it, renovating the space, upgrading the menu, and driving community engagement through comedy nights, hot wing comps, and vineyard longtable dinners.

To survive the operational chaos, I leaned into tech, deploying OCR for automated data entry, setting up a state-of-the-art POS and Kitchen Display System to aid inventory control and speed up our line cooks. We even launched an off-site catering business to absorb excess kitchen capacity during the off-season, using it to trial new recipes before they hit the main menu. I couldn't write code yet, but I was building systems and understanding how to apply tech to business problems.

During the final years of the restaurant, a new hobby emmerged: learning to code. Wanting to "learn HTML" to build a landing page for a product launch was the gateway. From there on, I was spending hours a day working through tutorials and building small apps. Once the restaurant wrapped up in 2020 (thank you, COVID), the relentless work ethic I'd honed as a restaurateur was refocused on becoming great at software development. I soon after started cutting my teeth as a dev.

The real "aha" moments happened while working with a restaurant equipment company. I built an ROI calculator that helped convey the value of their products. This was then followed up by an app that tightened up the accuracy of their online order shipping quotes. Then finally, a physical retro arcade machine running a sandwich-themed Space Invaders game to spice up their tradeshow booth. The hospitality era was over. I'd arrived.

Landed at Mojo Soup and went straight into building for major Queensland Government departments. The first six months were dizzying, in the best way. Large codebases, high‑calibre teammates and enterprise‑grade complexities.

As of early 2026 my current focus is on exploring cloud agents and harness engineering to accelerate development and mmigration of legacy codebases.