How I got here.
I didn't come to this from software. Out of school I started as a refrigeration mechanic. Four years on the tools, five to ten callouts a day, commercial and residential, and no two days the same. Half the job was working out why a system had stopped, what had actually caused it, and how to fix it. The other half was explaining that to someone twice my age who had no particular reason to trust a fresh-faced kid. Both halves came with me. Finding the real cause of a problem, and explaining it to the person who has to live with it. Although I loved the work, I always felt there was something more out there for me.
I went to university to study teaching. It was the right thing in the wrong place. What I like is watching somebody get better at something, and a classroom was never going to be where I did it. There was some retail in there too.
Then almost eight years at a Perth meal delivery business. I started as a delivery driver. The business kept growing, and each time something opened up I was asked to take it, until I was running the logistics department. Then COVID arrived and demand doubled inside a fortnight. I spent that period holding a department of drivers and contractors together through growth nobody had planned for.
That's where automation got me. Nobody asked for it. The work was repetitive, I could see the shape of it, and I started building my way out: rostering, asset management, booking the rental vehicles. Most of it lived in Excel and none of it was clever, and it held up under the volume, which is the only test that counts. Watching the first one run on its own was the most rewarding thing I'd done at work, and it's the reason I do this now.
Although I loved my time there, I had gone as far as I was going to go. So I went back to university and finished a Bachelor of Information Technology majoring in Cybersecurity and Forensics. A lot of my time went into computer science that wasn't part of the major, mostly programming, because it was the part I couldn't put down. I finished with a commendation for academic excellence, in the top two per cent of students in a bachelor.