I am the Founder and Company Director of The Improv Conspiracy Theatre – Melbourne's home of improv and sketch comedy. Located in the Melbourne CBD in Meyers Place, in early 2023 we acquired Theory Bar, a cocktail bar and events space below the theatre.We are:- A live comedy theatre open every Thursday–Sunday- Australia's leader in comedic arts education- A provider of corporate training and team-building facilitation- The perfect bar to host your next company or personal eventYes, I'm an experienced comedian and comedy teacher, but at the core I've always run this business through the lens of my start-up background, and relied heavily on my technical skills to things that no other small arts company would be capable of – whether "the best website in comedy", a custom event ticketing system, powerful internal tools or custom analytics/reporting.Starting from a Ruby on Rails monolith, the company's tech stack is now powered by React / Next.js on the front-end, communicating with a Rails-based API server through via GraphQL.A number of our internal tools are full-stack Next.js, using Next 14's app directory and React Server Actions.My productivity has gone up 10x, and my stress levels down by a similar margin, since switching to exclusively type-safe code. I spent one of Melbourne's COVID-19 lockdowns transitioning the entire stack to TypeScript, GraphQL and Sorbet (a static type checker for Ruby).One of my long-term goals is to start offer our underlying features to other comedy theatres around the world through a SaaS model.

Upon moving to Melbourne, I spent years doing project work on behalf of various clients and digital agencies. During this period I created too many Ruby on Rails and iOS apps to count, for clients both in Melbourne and overseas.My personal favourite was one of my final projects I created for Ogilvy Melbourne / DT – an iOS app and Ruby on Rails backend, for the 2014 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. Bluetooth Low Energy beacons were hidden throughout some of Melbourne's top bars and restaurants, and coming into proximity of them at select times would award lucky users with discounts and freebies.

Employee at Snap Technologies Inc. This was an Idealab start-up company founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Gross. It had the domain snap.com before it was later sold to SnapchatLead back-end developer on Snap Shots, a product which shows rich previews of a website’s outbound hyperlinks to users on mouseover.Back-end developer on Snap LinkAds, a product providing procedurally generated contextual ads. Through machine learning, the system converges towards showing ads that work while abandoning those that fail.Scaled the Snap Network to support installation on millions of websites, including major blogging networks (e.g. LiveJournal, Wordpress.com), servicing thousands of requests per second.Wrote custom database software, web servers, load-balancing proxies, and message queue systems to maximize throughput and redundancy while minimizing latency across hundreds of colocated Linux servers.Core in-house technologies worked on:- Custom key-value database for efficient, compact storage, querying and transmission of all in-house data. All data stored compactly in a custom binary format. Individual databases may be partitioning over any number of servers, to ensure redundancy and fast data access. [language: C | relevant libraries: glib]- Custom high performance web application server. Given a YAML or XML configuration, incoming HTTP requests are handled by making parallel requests to data sources such as databases, external partner APIs, RSS feeds fetched in realtime, etc. [C/glib]- Custom load-balancing, fault-resistant proxies to sit between frontend and backend services. [C/glib]- Custom message queue system to manage data flow despite rapidly evolving lists of publishers and subscribers. [C/glib]- High-performance HTML/XML scraping system, utilizing multiple cores/processors as available. [C, Ruby]- Ruby Gems to provide access to in-house C libraries for utility scripts and Ruby on Rails applications [C, Ruby]