About

I moved to Perth in the 1980s, studied at what’s now Edith Cowan University, and started out as a programmer at Telstra. Nearly forty years later I’m still a software and data engineer, and for more than thirty-three of those years I’ve run my own consulting practice — helping organisations, mostly across WA, work out what their systems are actually doing versus what everyone assumes they’re doing.

My family lives all around Australia, but my roots are here in Perth. I’ve lived all over this city and travelled through most of the state — Broome and Kununurra in the north, Esperance and Eucla in the south, the eastern Goldfields, Warburton, the remote borders with the Northern Territory and South Australia. I’ve watched this city grow, sprawl, and reinvent itself through booms and downturns.

Most of what that’s taught me doesn’t fit neatly in a meeting. It fits better here — in essays about data and systems and decision-making, in shorter notes when an idea isn’t fully formed yet, and in a book for people considering the same move to Perth I made a lifetime ago.

Everything here is written by me, not generated. If something was useful, wrong, or worth arguing about, I’d like to hear it — ···.