Recent experience
Leading the team behind Hydra, Cardano's flagship Layer 2 scaling protocol. Hydra’s objective is to increase transaction throughput, ensure cost efficiency, and maintain Cardano’s rigorous security protocol. It operates as an autonomous internal venture, the team owns product vision and technical architecture.
My impact
- Lead Hydra from a PoC implementation through to an established product; several companies now build platforms on top of Hydra.
- Owned the product and technical strategy, as well as delivery roadmap for Hydra.
- Contributing to and managing a team of engineers delivering the Hydra Head implementation of the Hydra protocol, shipping 17 major releases and many features across protocol improvements, security, networking, user experience, memory and efficiency, and robustness.
- Mentoring engineers across seniority levels, with a focus on growing technical ownership, confidence, problem solving and collaboration.
- Maintaining a high standard of testing: stateful property based tests, as well as end-to-end tests.
- Established sprint planning, retro cadences, and scoping practices that improved delivery predictability against a complex, research-adjacent roadmap.
Led engineering across a portfolio of consulting engagements - spanning early-stage startups, non-profit organisations, through to strategy and design studios.
My impact
- Designing, developing and delivering technical/data platforms
- Developing high-level technical product strategy
- Establishing software development practices
- Machine learning R&D
- Nix packaging for open-source libraries
- Python hacking in the energy modelling space; improved energy modelling optimisation times 10-fold
- Supporting CTOs in growing and defining approaches to engineering
- Translating executive objectives into tasks, projects and deliverables
- Using Nix to make reproducible development environments
- Created data pipelines using Dagster
Technical work and team leadership, both internally and on client projects.
My impact
- Developed research-level Haskell + machine learning project based around game theory
- Line-management of senior and junior engineers
- Open-source Haskell library development
- Created a podcast and recorded some episodes with community members
- Undertook deep R&D on quantum programming languages
- Promoted to technical lead of a client team
Technical work, team leadership, and product development.
My impact
- Quantum programming language research
- Released open-source library for quantum lab coordination software
Deep learning education for programmers, AI-adoption consulting for executives, technical guidance for startups.
My impact
- Taught deep learning to hundreds of professionals (technical and executives)
- Engaged the community through several events, both as an organiser and collaborating organisation
- Created and delivered AI for leadership workshops
- Created and delivered technical workshops on deep learning
- Delivered creative AI projects for large corporate clients
- Provided AUD$10,000 as workshop scholarships for under-represented communities in tech
- Strategic AI consulting
- Advisory CTO for clients: Hiring, tech strategy, and development
Technical consulting, sales, hiring, strategy, team leadership.
My impact
- Established AI/Deep-learning community in Australia
- Designed and developed several creative AI projects to the general public as part of city festivals and specific engagements
- Co-designed AI Platform-as-a-Service; brought to market
- Established deep learning workshops and trained two large cohorts
- Established new business channels bringing in new revenue
- Open-source contributions
- R&D of computer vision models
Earlier roles
2011 — 2016 Biarri — Senior Engineer
2007 — 2010 Cosmos 21+ Group — Senior Engineer
2006 — 2007 AT2 — Senior Engineer
2002 — 2005 Portland House Group — Software Engineer
Education
2013 — 2016 The University of Melbourne — Master of Science in Mathematics and Statistics
2010 — 2012 RMIT — Bachelor of Science in Physics
2001 — 2003 RMIT — Advanced Diploma of Information Technology
Selected community activities
The largest tech meetup in Edinburgh.
A group of people acting as backup curators for Haskell Technical Proposals; working under the umbrella of the Haskell Foundation.
A micro-grant program aimed at climate technology projects.
A "venture builder" program focused on the climate crisis. I participated in a 5-month-long cohort, collaborating with others on potential climate business ideas.
An "un-conference" focused on how to work with powerful predictive capabilities. Partly inspired by the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
Exhibited some public-facing AI projects: an AI Fashion Designer and an AI Dance Booth at Melbourne Knowledge Week, National Science Week and ACCA.
A meetup focused around creative AI; showcasing new results, discussing trends and approaches, and occasional practical hacking on projects as a group.
The first meetup in Melbourne to convene around deep learning/AI topics.
A conference celebrating all kinds of functional programming.
A ruby-on-rails website that is a "front" for the arXiv; it collects scientific papers and let's people vote up their favourites. Used extensively by quantum computing researchers.
A meetup aimed at bringing together the research maths and science community with the general public who are curious about what goes on inside those departments.
Varied contributions to projects in the form of code or issues; some very small libraries in Haskell and other miscellaneous projects.