About

Too many ideas.
Not enough room to think.

🎧 Listen 3 min

These days, most of what I learn comes through podcasts and YouTube. The ideas arrive faster than I can process them, until my head feels like a computer running out of memory. This site is where I slow them down, test them against two decades of building businesses and technology, and work out what is worth keeping. If you are also trying to make sense of AI, useful work and what comes next, you may recognise the feeling.

I learn best by listening and by moving between audio, text and visuals, which is why each piece includes a way to listen. AI has opened up new ways to present the same idea around how different minds learn. Dan Koe helped me see writing as a way to develop ideas. Jordi Visser reminded me that you are never too old, and it is never too late, to begin a new chapter and share what you have learned.

We often build our identity around our work. When a career stops going to plan, rebuilding means more than finding another job. It means working out who you are without the role you thought you would keep. I learned that when I had to rebuild my own career. I trained as a civil engineer, but after more than a decade working in and eventually running our family manufacturing business, returning to civil engineering was no longer a viable option. When I left the business, I struggled for a while to see where I belonged. Technology offered a path forward, but it meant returning to university to retrain as a data scientist. I had little choice but to enter through graduate and junior roles, then work my way back up. Over the decade since, I have built production data and AI systems across startups, consulting firms, government agencies and regulated industries. Rebuilding changed how I judge technology. A system is not useful simply because it works. It has to survive contact with people, constraints and consequences.

That is the problem I work on now. As an independent AI and data engineer, I am helping a Queensland Government department turn legislation and organisational knowledge into trustworthy AI systems. That means extracting processes and rules, connecting them through an ontology, and preserving the evidence people need to review the result. Established organisations carry decades of hard-won knowledge, controls and compromises. The opportunity is not to sweep those things away with AI. It is to preserve what matters while improving how the work gets done.

I am naturally reserved. I am not someone who works a room at a networking event. I tend to sit back and listen. Find a shared interest, though, and people who know me will tell you I can be hard to stop. This site is a way to have more of those conversations, but putting myself out there still makes me nervous. Keeping every idea in my head has a cost too. Writing gives me a way to test what holds, turn useful ideas into products and, over time, build lasting family capital. I do not have answers from the finish line. I have twenty years of lessons, current problems and a willingness to share what works, what fails and what changes my mind. This is where I make sense of my next chapter. You may find something useful for yours.