About me

I'm a software engineer, musician and writer living in Christchurch, New Zealand and this is my personal blog. I am currently a senior engineer working remotely for Microsoft on the Azure Kubernetes team.

I have a wide range of interests but most of them fall into the following main categories:

• Creative arts - Expressing myself through music and writing and appreciating others music, art, media and writing.
• Technology - I am a professional software engineer focussed on web, cloud and user experience. Outside of my day job I also take a keen interest in tech ethics.
• Secular spirituality - I believe there is almost nothing more important than improving my moment to moment experience and living with peace and ease. For me this involves practicing insight meditation and yoga, and reading about personal growth and communication.
• Friends and family - Ultimately my motivation to improve my own state of mind comes down to being able to be present with my friends, my family and my partner. To quote Ben Howard's song Old Pine "I've come to know the friends around you are all you'll always have".
• Physical health and wellbeing - This is tied up with the secular spirituality but I think there is no mental wellbeing without physical wellbeing. I primarily practice yoga and lift weights to maintain my physical wellbeing.

About this site

The site started as a way for me to to share knowledge and promote myself as a professional software engineer but now it has grown to be much more. I use this site to write about anything that catches my interest including tech ethics, philosophy, mindfulness, music, and more.

The site is built using Next.js and probably over-engineered for a personal blog site but I had fun making it! It's a playground for me to try out technologies and build things in a way I can't always do when working for a company. In the future I plan to start to open source aspects of the site and hopefully build tools that others can use to build similar sites.

I believe in self publishing and want to see more people writing in public on their own websites outside the incentives and control of big social media companies and advertising.