1994 → today

Thirty years of building the thing, then fixing how it runs.

Regional ISPs before the web was mainstream. Government firewall clusters. A poultry processing plant. Eight years inside Amazon. A granted US patent. Lean training in one of three facilities of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It reads as a wandering path, but it is one habit repeated: understand the system, remove the waste, make it hold.

1994 – 2001 · Early internet & UNIX

Milestone

1994 – 1996

Technical Lead — one of regional NSW's first ISPs

Northern Rivers Gateway (NRG) · Lismore, NSW

Built the ISP from dial-up modems, a Cisco router and a 128K ISDN link to Sydney.
Ran it on Slackware Linux with multiple serial cards feeding banks of physical modems — a Christmas tree of blinking lights at night.
First real introduction to UNIX, and to the idea that infrastructure is something you can build yourself.

1994 – 1996

Technical Training Instructor — early internet navigation

Northern Rivers Telecentre · Lismore, NSW

Taught Introduction to Macintosh and Introduction to the Internet to the Lismore community.
Worked alongside early-90s internet artists and university students building some of the first Australian websites.

1996 – 1997

MacOS Support Technician

Integrated System Solutions Corporation Australia

Second-level MacOS support across AppleTalk networks.
Contracted for three weeks, stayed five months — the entry point into corporate IT.
Started programming for MacOS to migrate drafting users off UNIX.

Milestone

1997 – 2001

UNIX Admin & Internet Security

NSW Department of Public Works & Services · Sydney

Maintained Solaris, RedHat Linux, HP-UX and SVR4 servers plus internet firewall security.
Secured servers across government divisions and stood up an IP DMZ server network.
Engineered remote monitoring for power, temperature and PABX control — critical-environment instincts, twenty years before it was called DCIM.
Built a fully fault-tolerant e-business DMZ: Foundry ServerIron hardware load balancing, three WebShield firewalls, two internet links, hosting web, FTP and database servers for multiple departments.

2000 – 2012 · Networks, ownership & operations

Milestone

2000 – 2002

Board Director & Shareholder, Technical

Nornet Pty Ltd · Lismore, NSW

Technical director with financial interest — first taste of carrying the commercial outcome, not just the system.
Built and maintained a multi-site IP network connecting clients across regional areas.
Developed in-house billing software in PHP and PostgreSQL with an online credit card gateway.
Monitored every server and network with Nagios and MRTG as primary 24/7 technical contact.

2002 – 2010

Technical Manager

Nornet Enterprises Pty Ltd · Lismore, NSW

Owned servers, network and business-account escalation across an eight-year run.
Migrated a multi-POP network to a single POP over Telstra Wholesale.
Created a 24/7 support business with a technician team able to answer and escalate.
Consolidated servers into virtualised co-location in Sydney — the first data center migration of many.

2010 – 2012

General Manager

Alstonville Poultry Farm · Alstonville, NSW

Ran every aspect of a food processing plant: HR, training, supervision, performance.
Redesigned the processing room to increase throughput.
Automated ordering, stock allocation and invoicing with OpenOffice macros.
Where process improvement stopped being an IT idea and became a physical, measurable one.

2013 – 2021 · Amazon & AWS · 8 years

Milestone

2013 – 2016

Senior Data Centre Technician

Amazon Web Services · Sydney

Installed, supported and troubleshot server and network hardware and software at hyperscale.
Vendor management while holding the line on physical and data security.
Built a JavaScript wrapper over the trouble ticketing system to give technicians real task workflows.
Built an automated rack position tester verifying network position was 100% ready before rack install.
Wrote UNIX and Greasemonkey scripts to automate daily activity; developed logistics automation for part allocation and stock control.

Milestone

2016 – 2020

Operational Excellence / ACES / LEAN / DevOps

Amazon Web Services · Sydney

Four and a half years of ACES and LEAN software and process development inside AWS data centres.
Continuous improvement delivered as working software, not slideware.
The formative period: Amazon's operational mechanisms, applied at a scale that punishes any process that does not hold.

2020 – 2021

Technical Program Manager

Amazon Web Services · Sydney

Designed the process flow for deploying new hardware into Amazon data centres.
Coordinated logistics, install and validation into a single repeatable deployment path.

Patent granted

2021

US Patent US11131692B1 — Line isolating power connector

United States Patent and Trademark Office

An original invention taken from problem statement through to granted patent.
View the patent

2022 – 2024 · Founder, Lean & teaching

2022 – 2023

Trainer

One Training (RTO 45692) · Ulverstone, Tasmania

Delivered a range of accredited courses to expand community skills and employability.

2022 – 2023

STEM Educator

HIVE Ulverstone · Tasmania

Taught STEM at HIVE, Ulverstone's community innovation and learning space.

2022 – 2023

Certificate IV in Training & Assessment (TAE40116)

TasTAFE · Plenty Training (RTO 32371)

Formal instructional design and delivery credentials — the qualification behind the coaching.

2023

Founder — Born Global Incubator

Enterprize Tasmania

Twelve-week Lean Startup program, ending in a digital Demo Day broadcast to tens of thousands.

2023

Founder — Giants Cohort 7

Blackbird

Ten-week program with mentoring, founder knowledge-sharing and accountability tracking.

Milestone

2023 – 2024

Chief Technology Officer

Lean AI · Australia

Applied AI to implement Lean across organisations — the thesis that now underwrites everything: the improvement layer itself can be automated.

Milestone

2023 – 2024

Lean Team Leader — Elphinstone SWE

People Improvers · Burnie, Tasmania

Facilitated Lean training in the Elphinstone Simulated Work Environment — one of only three facilities of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and the only one in Australia.
Taught Lean fundamentals and tools, then bridged the simulation back to participants' real operations.

2024

Small Business Mentor

The van Diemen Project · Tasmania

Mentored Tasmanian small businesses in Lean and AI tooling to improve workflows.
Supported by the Australian Government Small Business Advisory Services program.

2024 – now · APAC data center operations

Current

Nov 2024 – present

Manager, Operations Service Management, APAC

Vantage Data Centers · Sydney, NSW

Lead APAC operations service management across incident, problem, change and knowledge workflows, with a focus on service quality, governance and consistency across sites.
Led APAC service improvement through the APAC-to-global ServiceNow transition and the stabilisation period after it.
Established a consistent leadership reporting cadence — weekly APAC incident reporting plus RCA and corrective action reporting.
Drove process governance through standards and quality reviews across incident and problem documentation and RCA output.
Developed and implemented problem management KPI frameworks, including staleness controls and clearer accountability.
Coordinated stakeholders across Site Ops, Service Desk, CE, platform teams and leadership to resolve delivery and readiness risk.
Delivered workflow improvements through automation and structured process redesign to cut non-value-added work.
Managed and developed team capability, including direct leadership support for APAC Change Management.

Jul 2024 – present

Committee Member

NW Tasmania Community Media · The Central Coast Voice

Leading the relaunch of a free monthly community newspaper and introducing AI tools to automate editorial and distribution workflows.
Keeping an independent, not-for-profit voice viable for the Central Coast community.
tccv.au

Next chapter

Senior operations leadership in AI-era data centers.

Thirty years of building, running and fixing critical infrastructure — now pointed at the hardest version of the problem: keeping operational discipline while the industry rebuilds itself around AI capacity.

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