The Edison Union is a playground for all of my creative coding and other tech related projects. Follow me on Instagram @edisonunion.I make music from radiation and visuals that make you feel queasy.

When I showed my partner the ad for this role, she said "You have to get that job, I want a staff discount". So I did. And she did.I'm having the most wonderful time building the in-house engineering department at Bared Footwear, having taken over from the wonderful people at DotDev. Personal highlights include:🙋 Implementation of agile ways of working and developing team autonomy and ownership📦 Embracing continuous delivery ensuring we are deploying valuable work multiple times a day to our customers🧪 Implementation of test automation, upping our test coverage of a 50k LOC project to over 70% without sacrificing business goals💾 Set up of ETL pipeline, data warehousing, and business intelligence platform to increase visibility of important metrics🔍 Managing 3 engineers, as well as mentoring warehouse and customer service staff who expressed interest in becoming software engineers🪨 Stabilised platform enabling high volume sales to be run without any downtime, code freezes, deployment freezes or widespread customer or internal problems

To an ageing goth/metalhead, this was the ideal job. Head of Engineering at a funeral company! Death tech! Unfortunately due to a pivot in technology stack I decided to handover to someone else with more experience in that area and move on.And before you ask: No, I can't get you a discount on a funeral anymore.

After spending 6 years in the world of advertising, my engineering skills were a bit rough around the edges. I'd always worked in Waterfall organisations, so starting with an agency that embraced Agile ways of working was very much a come to Jesus moment.The leadership team at IE equipped me with the skills to be a good engineering leader, rather than just a neckbeard who spent 8 hours a day with his headphones on.When I wasn't inhaling $18 burgers at the Vegan Shack, I was able to work on-site as part of fantastic delivery teams in organisations like Toyota, RACV, Australia Post, and Bupa.

If you love coming up with amazing ideas, working until 4am to refine them, then chucking them in the bin then the world of advertising is for you!When I wasn't bumming smokes off the creatives, I was concocting an interactive film based in a post-apocalyptic Australia for the Australian Census, a network of digital billboards that identified what kind of car your drove and showed you why it was inferior to its equivalent Nissan, and building a white box with a needle on it that showed you how happy people were in a 50km radius based on Tweets.

I have to be honest and say leaving Lemonade was the hardest choice I've ever had to make, but it was also the easiest because the money JWT offered was absolutely stupid. My favourite moment at JWT was getting a message from a colleague in Sydney, saying he nearly got hit by a bus testing an AR game we'd developed for SEGA.In addition to that, we created some pretty good work for the Australian Government, Ford, Nokia, Melbourne Writers Festival, Nestle, Unilever, and Kraft.

After running up an incredible tax bill, I felt like it was time to let someone else take care of that for me, so I headed back to full-time work. When I wasn't getting hit by cars on my morning cycle, I was building content management systems and sites for clients such as Mercedes-Benz, Melbourne Arts Festival, BIG4, Alannah Hill, and Novo Shoes.

After my brief period as a seat warmer at Hyro, I shaved my head and set about a lucrative yet punishing 3-hour-a-day freelance career. When I wasn't sitting in a Brunswick St cafe by myself, or exploring my new home town by myself, or watching TV by myself, I was working on C#/Flash sites for clients such as Soap, JWT, DDX, Mark Agency, and built the first flash-based e-commerce for popular fashion brand Supré.

In its 19th iteration as a subsidiary of BMC media, Hyro bought out a company called Icon Media Lab in Melbourne. After this announcement, I asked my boss "Hey, can I move to the Melbourne office?", and he said "Sure! We will even pay for you to move down there", and he handed me a plane ticket and shoved me out the door.When I wasn't accidentally taking down the company email system, or being escorted from the premises by a project manager whose name I forget, I was creating email marketing software in C# for Heritage Wines and Telstra.

Have you ever worked on a helicopter-based Flash game for a flamboyant/criminal billionaire before? No? Well, I have, and I can die happy knowing that I am one of maybe 2000 people alive in the world who can say that.Hyro was the little studio that could. Over the years it had died many a death, and time after time rose from the ashes like the proverbial, until it finally died a final death a few years ago. When I wasn't carefully crafting death metal playlists to transfer to my 128mb MP3 player, or seeing System of a Down play at Channel V on my lunch break, I was creating high score systems, content management systems, and winning Silver Cannes Lions for clients such as Telstra, Nike, Coca-Cola Amatil, and Spotless Group.

This was the job to end all jobs. Hands down, the most fun I've had professionally in my life — if you ignore my first day on the job.You see, due to a number of factors such as the Dot Com crash, non-paying clients, and general incompetence of a certain 21-year-old, Dark Horizon had wound up a few months earlier in late 2000.After spending much of the summer frantically applying for any job I could find (yes even Data Entry), and locking myself in the toilet to hide from my landlord who was chasing rent, I was down to my last $5.You know how I remember it was $5? My car ran out of petrol on the freeway on my way to the office, and I had to get towed to a petrol station, where I then put said $5 in the tank. I had to call my dad on a pay phone and ask him to pay for the tow.My first conversation with my boss was: "I am sorry I am an hour late and sweaty, but do you think I could get an advance on this week's pay?"When I wasn't smoking inside, playing a round of "take a letter" with the boys, or chasing would-be intruders down the street in my socks at 2am, I was working with some of the most caring and talented individuals in the industry, creating games and sites and content management systems, as well as writing functional and technical specifications, for the likes of Lion Nathan, Siemens, Sydney Theatre Company, Nokia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

One day in 1997 — I can't tell you what the exact day or month was because it was last century — on the floor of a soon-to-be-condemned goth share house in East Redfern (or Surry Hills if you're reading this, Mum), 3 friends declared that they had the drive, the ability, and the passion to start their own web agency, only to be proven catastrophically wrong 3 years later.During this time I had my first proper client sales meeting with Ferrero. I wore a black waist coat over a black shirt, which was the style at the time. During the meeting, I was asked point blank if I could do the job — I think it was nothing more than exporting a CSV file from some database — and being a good catholic boy, I was now faced with a problem: I couldn't say no, because we wouldn't get the job, but I couldn't say yes, because that would be a lie. So I did what anyone would do in that situation, and I sat there mute, gradually turning a deeper shade of red until my more morally-flexible partner jumped in and saved the day.Due to the fact that self-care and boundaries weren't a thing in the 90s, I took on way more than I could handle during this time. I was working 9-5 doing DTP with a Golden Laborador in a house in West Ryde, I would then go to a newspaper and let myself in, setting ads for the following day's edition all by myself. I used to go down to the mouldy archive in the basement and flick through ancient editions.Thanks to Sydney's excellent public transport system, I would get home after midnight and tuck into a dinner of Jolt Cola and Benson & Hedges and set about doing my Dark Horizon work.When I wasn't getting home from goth clubs at 7am and sleeping til 5pm, or getting adopted by 40-year-old punks at the Oxford Tavern in Newtown, I was extending my skill set to include database design, network administration, and ASP/PHP for clients like Volvo, Deutsche Bank, and Versace as well as managing a team of over 20.

I didn't follow the path of most teenagers. Casual shifts at Maccas? Weekends in retail or hospo? No, my first job was marking targets at a rifle range. Standing in the blazing hot sun for 4 hours on a Saturday, with bullets flying over — and sometimes ricocheting back at — my head, all for a grand total of $20 which afforded me the ability to buy a death metal CD every 2 weeks.My first REAL job though was working for Nouveau Monde, when the world wide web was in its infancy and JavaScript was only used for image hovers. Working out of a mouldy bedsit in Tamarama, and later a mouldy house in Woollahra, we created websites for the likes of One.Tel, Jaguar, and Hotel Intercontinental.When I wasn't shouting to the internet that I was a vegetarian, but still eating ham sandwiches for lunch, I was working on my design and HTML skills and learning a bit about streaming video.