How I got here

I ran kitchens for twenty years before any of this.

I started an IT degree in 2021 while I was an executive chef, took my first developer job the year after, and finished the degree two years later while working full time.

Why a kitchen is decent training for this

I finished as executive chef at Southside, after Little Valley, Rick Shores, The Long Apron and Spice Bar. Southside was not the first restaurant I opened — the planning, the kitchen design, the menus and the first crew, all of it before a single service.

It is a better preparation for this work than it sounds — service does not move because you are not ready, and neither does a launch. Consistency under load, knowing precisely how much can go wrong at once, and doing it where every failure happens in front of the people paying for it. That turns out to be most of what shipping software is.

Twenty months of doing both

I started at QUT in February 2021 and did not leave the kitchen to do it. I had opened Southside the year before and was running it, and for the next twenty months I was an executive chef during service and a student around it. I took my first developer job in October 2022, two years before I graduated, and finished the degree with distinction in October 2024 while working full time.

That is the part I would want to know about someone I was hiring. Not that I can learn something new — that I finished it while it was inconvenient.

Regulated work is where nearly all of it has been

Survey data for public health organisations including Queensland Health. Enrolment, assessment and compliance workflows for registered training organisations. Most recently a TGA-regulated medical device platform, where I am lead developer and write the technical documentation behind its regulatory approval.

None of that was a specialism I set out to have; it is simply where the work has been. What it changed is how I build. Documentation and accessibility are part of the build rather than something bolted on afterwards, because in those settings they are not optional — and the projects that survive are the ones someone else can pick up.

What I am doing now

I am contracting full time and taking on selected project work alongside it — marketing sites, design systems, and product builds for teams that need something delivered properly and quickly.

When you hire me for one of those you get the whole stack from one person: brand and design system through to a deployed, documented, accessible product. Not because working alone is a virtue, but because the handoffs are where most of the cost and nearly all of the misunderstanding lives.