sydney, australia
software engineer and web developer. i build clean, fast websites and small tools that do one thing properly, and when i'm not doing that i'm usually somewhere outside looking up.
i'm a software engineer and web developer based in sydney, australia. i started out writing html in a text editor because i wanted a corner of the internet that was mine, and somewhere along the line the tinkering turned into the thing i do most days.
most of my work lives on the web. i like building interfaces from scratch: laying out a page, getting the type right, making sure it still holds together on a phone with a bad connection. i care a lot about the parts nobody is supposed to notice, like how quickly a page paints, whether the layout shifts while it loads, and whether the thing you clicked responds immediately or half a second later. good software feels quiet, and quiet takes a surprising amount of work.
outside the browser i write python and java, and i've been spending more time in swift lately. almost everything i build starts as a problem i personally have. a grade tracker because keeping marks across six subjects in a notes app was miserable. a minecraft plugin because i wanted to actually see what my server was doing instead of guessing. that's usually the best brief you can get: build the thing you keep wishing existed.
i'd rather ship one small thing that works properly than five that almost do.
when i'm not coding i'm reading about spaceflight, following launch windows i have no business being invested in, or outside with a pair of binoculars trying to find something faint. it's a decent counterweight to a job where everything happens on a screen, and a reminder that the interesting problems are much, much bigger than the ones in my editor.
three overlapping things, really. they all end up feeding each other: a plugin teaches me something about performance, and that shows up in a website two months later.
websites and interfaces built from the ground up, without reaching for a template. i write semantic markup, keep the css readable, and add javascript only where it earns its place. everything is responsive by default, keyboard accessible, and light enough to load properly on mobile data.
small programs that solve a specific, annoying problem. usually that means a clear data model, a boring interface, and no features i can't justify. i'd rather spend the time on the two screens people actually use every day than build ten they'll open once.
the category that keeps me curious. plugins, servers, monitoring, and the occasional weekend spent reading documentation for something i don't strictly need. this is where i learn the things that make the other two categories better, like how systems actually behave once they're under load.
the languages i reach for most, and the tools that surround them. i'm not precious about any of it. the stack should follow the problem, not the other way around.
a few things i've built and still maintain. all of them started as something i wanted for myself, which is probably why they're the ones that got finished.
a new tab page that replaces the blank slate with something worth looking at. every morning it pulls a fresh astronomy background from nasa, so opening a tab usually means a nebula, a launch, or a shot of a planet you weren't expecting.
underneath it's deliberately plain: google search wired straight into the page, a handful of themes so it matches whatever browser setup you're running, and aggressive caching so the image never blocks the thing you actually opened the tab to do. it's the project i use the most, dozens of times a day, which makes every rough edge impossible to ignore.
visit sitea grade tracker built specifically for nsw students. you add your marks, and it handles the rest: weighted subject averages, upcoming exams, and your sentral timetable pulled into the same place so you're not checking three apps to work out where you're supposed to be.
the hard part wasn't the maths, it was the interface. school data is messy and the people using it are stressed and on their phones between periods, so everything important had to be visible without a single tap. it's the project that taught me the most about designing for a real, impatient audience rather than an imaginary one.
visit sitea paper plugin that gives 1.21.11 minecraft servers real-time metrics. tick rate, memory, entity and chunk counts: the numbers you need when the server starts stuttering and everyone in chat is asking why.
writing it meant being careful about the thing i was measuring. a monitor that costs performance is worse than no monitor at all, so collection runs light and stays off the main thread wherever it can. it started as a debugging aid for a server i ran with friends, then turned out to be useful to other people too.
visit githuba snapshot of what's taking up space in my head right now. it changes often.
more of sapphire. better exam handling, and an offline mode so it still works when the school wifi inevitably doesn't.
swift and swiftui properly, instead of the copy-paste-and-hope approach i took the first time around.
how much javascript a website actually needs. usually the answer is less than the one i started with.
reading about deep space missions, and slowly getting better at finding things in the sky without an app telling me where to point.
got something you want to talk about?
i'm not taking freelance work at the moment, but my inbox is always open. collaborations, open source, questions about something i've built, or a "would this even be possible" conversation are all welcome. i read everything, and i'll usually get back to you within a day or two.