personal

Twenty years in, and finally writing it down

8 min read

I work on Spinifex at Mulga.

  • career

The long way round

Some people know exactly what they want to do as a career long before they finish school – I am not some people.

  1. 2006
    Graduated High School

    Kept my options wide open: Maths, Physics, Chemistry, English

  2. 2007
    Started Master of Architecture at UniSA

    Withdrew after 12 weeks, with no backup plan.

  3. 2008
    Started Electronics Apprenticeship

    Manufacture and repair of Clipsal home automation systems (CBUS).

  4. 2008
    Enlisted, Royal Australian Air Force

    Electronics technician — deployable satellite comms, VSATs to 2.4 m dishes.

  5. 2011
    First deployment — Operation Slipper

    Network and satellite shift technician, Middle East.

  6. 2013
    Operation Philippines Assist

    Huminatarian Aid and Disaster Relief (HADR) in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan (Category 5 hurricane).

  7. 2015
    Operation Okra

    NCO in charge of deployed server operations at the main operating base.

  8. 2017
    Commissioned — Electrical Engineering Officer

    Officer Training School, then full-time engineering study.

  9. 2021
    BEng (Hons), UNSW Canberra / ADFA

    Air Force scholarship; graduated with honours.

  10. 2024
    Into industry

    A real hands-on engineering role building search applications at Kestra.

  11. 2026
    Building Spinifex at Mulga

    An AWS-compatible cloud you run on your own hardware.

Where the years actually went

Twenty years, by chapter
HSC -> Maybe a career?2yrs
RAAF — enlisted9yrs
RAAF — officer7yrs
Industry2yrs

From the ground up: Apprentice -> Technician -> Grad -> Engineer.

What I actually do now

Since leaving full-time service in the Air Force, I was fortunate enough to land a job building and maintaining end-to-end, bespoke, search applications – predominantly for Government (still in my comfort zone), at a company called Kestra.

I remained in Air Force as a reservist working on a communications project, and happened to see a sponsored post on LinkedIn by Mulga CTO Ben Duncan talking about Spinifex – which stood out with potential for being a real enabler for agile, edge deployments. I immediately messaged Ben to find out more and he just-so-happened to be coming to Canberra in two days time for a hack-a-thon. We agreed to meet for coffee and chat about ditributed edge cloud computing, and by the end of the chat I had inadvertently made it through the first stage of the job interview.

Fast forward two months: I had finished my notice period at Kestra and was on the road to Peregian Beach QLD with my family – leaving our comfortable Canberra life behind for a chance at tech start-up greatness (and never having to wear a black, down-filled, puffer jacket again).

A tech start-up is almost as far away from anything I was familiar with in a professional setting. Despite what the glossy recruiting posters say – Defence tech is not always the bleeding-edge or state-of-the-art – unless it has wings and goes fast! Mulga has given me the opportunity to really stretch my legs and experiment with new things, test what works and build systems that will hopefully disrupt the status-quo for what a resilient and adaptable military compute deployment looks like.

The product we are building is Spinifex and it is an AWS-API-compatible cloud infrastructure platform that you can run wherever you need it. Being AWS API compatible means existing AWS workloads can be easily moved from AWS to Spinifex. A follow-on post will go into Spinifex in more detail, but here is an overview:

Apps
Your infrastructure & appsAI trainingInferenceWeb & APIsDatabasesBatch & data
Tooling
AWS toolingaws-cliTerraformkubectlAWS SDKsPacker
↓ AWS API · SigV4Response ↑
Spinifex
AWS orchestrationGateway → NATS → daemons
EC2ComputeQEMU / KVM
EBSBlock storageViperblock
S3Object storagePredastore
VPCNetworkingOVN / OVS
IAMIdentitySigV4 · policies
EKSKubernetesK8s-conformant
+ ALB · ECS · ECR · RDS and more of the core AWS services
OS
Operating systemDebian / Ubuntu LTS · systemd · KVM · Linux bridge · Open vSwitch
Hardware
CPUIntel · AMD · ARM
GPUNVIDIA · AMD
Fig. 1The Spinifex stack — your apps and AWS tooling on top, the orchestration and engine room in the middle, standard Linux and your own hardware underneath.

What this journal is for

Anything/everything.

Part web project, part blog, part portfolio, part resume.

A place to keep record of things I have done, things I am doing, and things I want to do.

Off the clock

Primarily, I am a father of two great kids, and husband to my amazing wife Katie.

Outside of that I am a tinkerer. Computers, software, hardware, networks, 3D printers, and most recently astronomy.

I have fond memories as a child with my Grandad, looking up to the night sky and learning all about the contellations and our place in the universe. It is an interest that has out-lived all others and I decided to finally turn it into a hobby by purchasing a rather large telescope. My love of space is also the inspiration for the live star field in the background.

Even more recently I purchased a camera for my large telescope. I definitely don’t know what I am doing yet, but this was a pretty easy one to get:

The Orion Nebula (M42), photographed by the author.
ImgThe Orion Nebula (M42)

What’s next

I’ll continue building out Spinifex with the team at Mulga, and hopefully share some of the more notable features as they release!