I spent my 20s discovering the world using Japan as a base, performing as a singer/guitarist, travelling through Asia, surfing and meeting many of my lifelong friendsWith an entrepreneurial eye, at the turn of the millennium, Y2K was actually the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I was opening up a backpacker’s resort and bar in Koh Phangan, Thailand. A group of friends and I designed and built it from the ground up & it still remains today. After returning to Japan, I stumbled across my first computer problem. It was Windows 98, and it had done what Windows 98 loved to do and refused to boot. Getting it working again became an obsession… The next part of my journey had begun.With my interest tweaked, I tried to learn as much as possible about computers, networking, and how data was encapsulated and sent over the wire. While living in Japan, I did various courses online, exams, etc… Fast-forward a couple of years, and I was back in NZ, landing my first IT role. I began to work my way up the IT infrastructure career stack. In 4 years, I navigated my way through several promotions, starting as a Level 1 service desk analyst > Level2 > Level3 > Systems Engineer > Consulting Engineer, and finally to Infrastructure Architect, and then the curve levelled out for a while; what next?In 2012, entrepreneurship and IT converged, and Figure8 was born. Figure8 came about from a niche identified in the market, being the need for truly independent and vendor-agnostic architecture.Figure8 is now a leading-edge IT solutions provider to its valued customers. Taking advantage of emerging technologies to reduce cost and risk whilst creating a rewarding environment for its staff. Figure8 continues to evolve with the market constantly expanding its skillsets, which range from traditional infrastructure to cloud-native digital technology and services. Being multi-faceted is what keeps life interesting for me. With a long-time interest in learning as much as possible about the origins and shared history of life on this planet, including the biological and cultural evolutionary forces that have shaped humans through deep time, I am now in the final stages of a BSc double major in the Biological Sciences and Biological Anthropology. I have a passion for conservation, genetics, and technology. I aim to bring this knowledge together to provide more precision-orientated and quantitatively informed biological solutions to improve the quality of all lifeforms equally and holistically. There is so much more to learn and even more yet to discover…