Profile
I'm a Software Engineer from Melbourne, Australia currently working with a lot of incredibly smart people over at SerpApi where I'm lucky enough to spend my time working on all things web scraping. I've previously worked in fintech, legal tech, and indie game development. For well over a decade I've also done web scraping and game development just for fun (and the challenge) and I'm very grateful to be in a position to continue web scraping in a professional capacity.
History
I started programming when I was 11 years old, but was an avid computer user earlier than that and I've had the pleasure of experiencing everything from life on the old x86 machines (and had plenty of fun mashing the "turbo" button on them before I even really knew what it did) without a mouse, through to the joy of hearing the magical dial-up sound when you wanted to get online to have a browse, and so much more.
I'm a perpetual tinkerer, and I'm pretty sure that is all thanks to my dad who would regularly supply us kids with things like old TVs, radios, computers and the like to just pull apart, see what components they have, and see if we can make them do anything after making our own circuits for them. He also taught us how to use pretty much all of the tools in the shed and would regularly get us involved in work on cars, construction/renovation projects, and pretty much anything else that would exercise the brain.
Thanks to all of that, I thoroughly enjoy making and tinkering with various sorts of things, especially when it comes to code and especially when I apply arbitrary constraints or just try to achieve something for the sake of achieving it. I think it's good food for the brain and it's also a lot of fun!
The Site
I learned a few years ago that I have aphantasia (level 5 or "complete aphantasia" apparently), so my design skills aren't amazing, but because I'm happy tinkering away, I think I've done an okay job at making the site.
I leaned on tools like those colour wheels that give you complementary colours after you enter the main one you like to make the site look visually passable.
Past that, I write everything in markdown and I have a custom static site compiler written in Ruby that I use for the site and pretty much every one of my other static sites.
Talks
The year of 2026 marks the year that I have given my second talk in front of a somewhat sizeable audience, the talk prior (my first talk) was a lightning talk almost a decade ago. Now that I've given more than one talk, I can now say that "I give talks," so from now on I'll list any that I give below.