From UTS to platform lead — building software in Sydney

Recorded at Sydney Tech Hub on a Thursday evening, 6:30pm AEST. Lightly edited for length.

You graduated from UTS in 2019. What did the first few years look like?

Fast. I went from a comp-sci degree that was all systems programming and CLI tooling straight into a junior role migrating legacy jQuery and PHP to a modern TypeScript stack. The lesson that stuck wasn’t a framework — it was that owning the boring infrastructure is what makes everyone else faster.

You’ve worked across some big Sydney names. What changed in how you build?

Early on I shipped features and handed deploys to a platform. By the time I was leading platform work, I owned the whole pipeline — containerisation, git-push deploys, the lot. We took a deploy from about twenty minutes down to under three. That kind of thing compounds: faster deploys mean smaller, safer changes, which means people actually ship.

Why self-host everything?

Your personal sites all run on one cheap box. Why not just use a platform?

Because a single A$9 VPS running Dokku covers more than people expect, with no per-seat or bandwidth surprises. I run multiple sites and a database on it. The trade-off is that I own the ops — but git-push deploys get me ninety percent of the platform DX. If you want the gory details, that’s [the architecture deep dive] on my dev site.

And the Model Context Protocol — where does that fit?

MCP is the standard I wish I’d had years ago. Instead of bespoke connectors per tool, you write a server once and every compliant client understands it. I started writing about it after we used it internally, and it grew into a book.

Why it matters down under

Anything specific about doing this in Sydney?

Timezone discipline, mostly. When your collaborators and CI runners live in other timezones, AEST becomes a feature you design around, not an afterthought. And the community here is small enough that you’ll see the same faces at meetups — which keeps you honest. People will tell you to your face when an idea won’t work.

Advice for someone starting out in the Sydney scene?

Go to the meetups, give a talk before you feel ready, and learn to run your own infrastructure once. After that, every abstraction makes sense because you’ve seen what’s underneath.